Finished projects

I'm feeling rather pleased with myself as I managed to finish two projects last weekend while we were driving up to Suffolk for Grandma's birthday. I finished knitting and crocheting them both a couple of weeks ago, but as usual it's taken me a while to sew them up!


I made the elephant for my friend's new baby girl. We called into see them for lunch and a lazy afternoon on Saturday before continuing onto my Aunt's for the birthday celebrations. I had lots of lovely cuddles with baby Emma and was rewarded with a little bit of sick and lots of smiles! The pattern for the elephant came from this blog, and B and Emma's big brother have put orders in for their own!


And this is the waistcoat I made for Grandma's birthday that I was keeping a secret. I'm really pleased with it - it's not my taste but it's definitely Grandma's, and her favourite colour too. I made it longer than the pattern suggests as Grandma likes her tops to cover her back well. I found the pattern listed on Ravelry (a site that I'm spending more and more time on). The cover of the book it's in nearly put me off as it looks so dated, but I think it turned out rather well.

Cuteable

I had a lovely surprise this morning - my Golden Lovebird is featured on the Cuteable blog! This is one of the blogs that I check out regularly as there are always so many lovely things featured, so I'm really pleased that one of my pieces has been included!

The items in this particular blog post were chosen by Belinda from Shop Handmade UK, and if you wander over to the Shop Handmade UK blog you'll find a nice discount code waiting for you! Thank you Belinda!

Guaranteed Delivery

I've decided to sign up with a courier due to the Royal Mail strikes. I usually use Special Delivery, and while I haven't had any problems with this service during the strikes as Royal Mail have been making them a priority, I don't want to risk any problems as the strikes continue.

So....at no extra cost to you, my dear customers, all UK parcels will be sent by the courier myHermes who will call back twice more if you are out the first time. The parcels are trackable, and I'll include the tracking number in the order dispatch details.

And what's more, they will come and collect the parcels from me so that I don't have to wait in the post office queue - how cool is that!

P.S. On a serious note, I am steadily growing more angry about these strikes - don't they realise the damage that they are doing to everyone, and that most people who have switched to using couriers won't switch back afterwards? I really want to support my local post office and send my parcels through them, but I feel as though my hand has been forced. I'm going to leave my comments on this whole stupid affair at that, as if I go any further this will turn into a long rant!

Look what the postie brought me today!

Look look!! I actually got some post today!

Now, don't worry, this isn't going to be a Royal Mail strike moaning blog post - but I'm certain that I'll write one soon.... I'm excited because the beads for the next Designer Challenge for Beads and Beyond arrived this morning and they are gorgeous! They're from Precious Sparkle beads, who I tend to buy quite a few beads from, and I've already planned out what I'm going to make with them.


I can't spoil the surprise, but if you're very good you can have a look at the packaging - aren't I generous?! If you look closely you may even be able to see a few of the colours contained in that plain looking bag.

Out of hibernation

It's taken me much longer than I expected to get back into the habit of blogging after coming back from holiday, mainly as it's taken me a while to get used to my new routine of B at preschool three mornings a week and at his childminder's one and a half days a week, and of teaching two evenings a week. The second evening class, a beginner's jewellery class at our local secondary school on Wednesday evenings, started the day after we came back from holiday and it's going well, lots of fun to teach and everyone's very enthusiastic. I've also been really busy with orders from a couple of galleries for their Christmas stock, and with orders from notonthehighstreet.com and my website. It seems as though the Christmas shopping season has arrived!

I have been planning blog posts as I've been sitting working in the shed though, so I thought that rather than write one long post of what we've been up to I'd actually write up the ones I'd planned in my head, so if you want to catch up with everything and see what commissions and projects I've been working on have a read of the posts below!

Right then, back to work - I've got a magazine project to finish!

Halfterm glow stick fun

It's amazing how much fun you can get out of a tube of glow sticks from the local £1 store!

A couple of repairs

I don't often take on repair work. I've only once needed to repair a piece of jewellery that I've made, and that was because I'd sold the bracelet to a friend of mine who has a habit of catching bracelets on door handles and breaking them. I don't really like repairing jewellery made by other people as a) I can never be completely certain exactly what materials have been used to make the piece, b) repairs can be time consuming and so take time away from the work I really want to do and c) to be blunt it's rarely worth my time doing the work as people generally do not want to pay very much for the work at all and although the repairs rarely require much in the way of new materials they do take a lot of time and my time is money! So I don't advertise that fact that I can repair jewellery, but every now and then I'll repair something that a customer has brought in to a gallery I supply work to or that a friend or colleague needs mending.


T brought the ring in these pictures home from work one day, with a note from a colleague of his asking if I could mend it. As you can hopefully see the 'before' photos the band of the ring had completely snapped. Soldering it back into place and cleaning up the new soldering wasn't actually going to be that big a job, but the first thing that I had to do was remove the turquoise as that would be damaged by the heat from the torch, and that was where the problems started!


The bezel setting was very rough and quite sharp in places, but it wasn't too hard to gently pull open. However, what looked like quite a big stone actually turned out to be a thinner cabochon with some kind of packing behind it (an unfortunately common trick to make stones appear bigger and therefore more expensive) that had just crumbled away to leave a right old mess. So, after repairing the band of the ring I had to clean up the inside of the bezel setting and then file and sand the bezel down so that it fitted the stone properly. The bezel actually ended up looking a lot better than it had originally!


It took a while, but I was actually quite pleased with myself when I had finished and oxidised everything so that it had the same finish as before and I'd reset the stone. I still prefer making my own designs though!