Sew Much Fun!

I am quite excited today!

For a while I've been focusing my efforts on starting a craft group in Nottingham, and the first meeting is finally rolling round on Monday!

It's so much fun to get together with a group of people and share what you're passionate about, and this is an opportunity to do just that. It was much easier to organise than I initially thought, and there has been a lot more interest than I expected - there are a lot of enthusiastic crafters out there!

I set up a website for the group through Meetup, a great place for aspiring groups to get themselves seen. If you want to check it out, you can find my web page here. At some point I'd like to design my own website, but that's for another day...

I've been a bit overwhelmed by people's generosity as well; the first session is meeting at my house, as I didn't know of a venue that wouldn't cost a small fortune to hire, but just this week I've heard from the Nottinghack group offering a potential venue! I'm going to check it out next week so fingers crossed...

I'm very excited!

I love chain :)

I've been making some new necklaces lately, much simpler than my usual fully beaded designs but striking for all that. I'm trying hard not to just steal them myself...

Though to be honest one of the things I love about making jewellery is the ability to always make a piece of jewellery to match an outfit - even if it's only half an hour before I go out (which has been known!).

For the new necklaces I've been using sterling silver chains as a base and making a beaded pendant to go on it. Generally I'll choose a colour to base the necklace around; sometimes based on a particularly lovely bead that I want to include, and then build the pendant around that colour using glass beads, wire and chain.

This is one of my favourites:I love it partly because of the colour - I think the mix of turquoise and blue works really well, but I also love the little heart pendant that I added as a focal point. The chain that this one is on is a spiral chain; it's a bit more interesting that a basic curb chain and looks really pretty.

One of my other favourites is this purple one:My favourite thing about this necklace is the little cream dove pendant. It's so pretty and goes really well with the purple and white beads which made up the main part of the necklace. I hung this one on a snake chain; it gives a really different effect from the spiral chain I used above as it holds its shape more (you can see the way it curves around rather than hanging to a point) and makes the chain more of a feature of the necklace.

What do you think?

Earring Making

I had a bit of an earring making session last night!

With a craft fair coming up in a couple of weeks, I suddenly realised that my stock of earrings was phenomenally low (erm... about 4 pairs!). I had ordered some new sterling silver hooks last week and set about turning them into earrings.

I love dangly earrings, and made lots of earrings with small shell beads hanging from them. I also made some angel earrings (a bit like the angel keyrings in my shop) and some more turtle earrings which are just sooooo cute!

All in all a very good evening's work I think!

Wedding Invitations :)

I'm currently in the middle of planning my wedding - and boy I never realised quite how much work it was! And it's so easy to get caught up in the little details that you forget what the important things are.

My fiance and I have gone on and off the idea of making our own invitations over the last few months; I love making cards (I love any craft in fact!) so liked the idea of doing it, but thought the work involved might be a bit too much. Though seeing how much we were likely to spend getting all our wedding stationary done professionally did make it seem a more attractive prospect!

Today we decided to have a go at producing some prototypes. We went out to a craft shop and bought a selection of card, a heart shaped cutter and some ribbon and set to work. After playing around with a few ideas, lots of double sided sticky tape and giggles and a lot of fun, we produced four lovely designs we couldn't separate...


Having seen the fun involved we're now going to round up our friends and have a weekend invitation making :) A lot more fun than going to a shop to order invites and a chance to get all our friends involved in our wedding, something we would love to do.

And as for the four designs, we couldn't decide between them so we're not going to, we're going to use them all :)