Lots of lovely labels !

Look what the postman brought me yesterday .... 500 of these lovely, lovely, lovely woven labels ! I am soooooooooo pleased ! Can you tell ??

These will be stitched onto all of my new felt goodies, so that everyone knows exactly where they came from ! I actually bought the labels from this guy on etsy and can't recommend him enough. I haven't found anyone in the UK that could produce the labels to match my logo so perfectly and at £42 for 500 including postage, I think it's a pretty good deal.

Talking of felt goodies - I had a shipment from Nepal earlier this week and whilst I didn't receive everything that I had ordered :o( I did get these

Felt ball samples for a jewellery designer in New York

Keyrings

Pencil cases

Coasters (these designs will also be available as placemats)

All of the above will be available for sale through my website very soon. The remainder of the items are due in next week so I'll post piccies as soon as they get here.

Tomorrow, Paul and I are off to Long Melford for a child-free weekend - a belated Christmas present to ourselves !

Enjoy your weekend whatever you get up to.

Sarah x

WiRE

Last night I attended my first Women in Rural Enterprise (WiRE) meeting. After initially feeling extremely nervous, it turned out to be a great evening and I met some lovely ladies, all of whom are working for themselves, in a whole host of areas.

The speaker for the evening was a lady that runs her own PR agency and she gave us lots of tips for writing press releases, networking, contacting the media etc. I shall certainly be putting some of these tips in to practice very soon as I'm keen to get a press release organised for the launch of my new website.

I've been asked to attend next month's meeting and showcase some of my products, which I am very excited about. I gave out of lots of my business (MOO) cards, and received lots of lovely comments about them, which was great.

If you're keen to promote your own business, it's certainly worth looking up your local WiRE group - they provide lots of information in relation to women in business and it's always good to network with other business women - you never know who you might meet !!

All in all, a very nice evening !!

I've had my fair share

Hiya

First off, thank you to all of you lovely people that sent me your good wishes on my last post - I really appreciate them and sincerely apologise for not emailing each of you individually to say thanks.

Well, they say things come in 3's and I think I've had 4 because following on from my last post, some kind soul decided to hit my car in Sainsbury's carpark and then very kindly drove off without leaving any details whatsoever. So THANK YOU VERY MUCH you coward !

Right, now that's off my chest I've decided that life's too short to keep moaning (and I am very aware of the fact that my last few posts do seem to have been very moany posts - so I am extremely sorry) - it won't happen again !

I'm still waiting for my Nepalise order to arrive but have been assured that it will be with me by Monday, so at last I'll have something interesting and exciting to show you !! Thanks for hanging in there guys - I really appreciate it.

Yesterday the sun finally shone - HOORAY !!! And I managed to take some photos of my felt stash

These photos are going on my new website and will be offered as colour choices for the new "Create your own Loopy Corsage" option that I've decided to offer. Yes - for the princely sum of £8 (including postage), you will be able to create your own loopy corsage from whatever colours you like and each corsage will be finished off with a colour co-ordinated hand painted ceramic button. Nice idea?

Talking of my "new" website, I think I might have inadvertantly mislead some of you. Once the new site goes live, it will look exactly the same as my current site (with a few very minor differences), but will have lots and lots more lovely goodies available to purchase. I didn't want to go making announcements about my new site and to have you all disappointed when you look at the site and see that it seems to look exactly the same. I have to admit I do love the look of my website, which is why I didn't want to change it, but it will be sooooooo much better goodies-wise and if you can't find something you want to buy on there, I shall want to know why ??!!!

I shall leave you with this amusing picture of my gorgeous daughter who "wants to look clever like Mummy" !! Clever or simple .... you decide !!

Enjoy the rest of your week !

Not a lot to report

Sadly this is another really BORING post !! After I posted last week about the rain coming through the roof, things unfortunately went from bad to worse.

• The rain is still coming through the roof despite us covering it with tarpauline, so this leads us to think it's the flashing rather than the roof felt that needs repairing.
• We've all had flu virtually all week
• Our Jeep has developed a horrible shaking / judder when you turn the steering wheel on full lock so I took it to the dealers who looked at it, fiddled about with it for the morning and told me it was repaired only to have me drive it off the forecourt and have the exact same thing happen again less than half a mile away !! So back I went, ranted and raved a bit and told them it wasn't fixed and wouldn't you just know it, the stoooopid car wouldn't do it for them !! So I had to hope they were right and that I was just a silly woman driver who didn't know how to drive a car properly. Fortunately for me, it would appear that I'm not a silly woman driver as the same problem happened to Paul this morning, so now I have to take it back again on Monday and hope they can sort it out. And to add insult to injury, one of the back wheels on our Focus has completely seized up resulting in the car not being able to move, and us ripping a huge great big gauge out of our drive in our efforts to try and release the stuck wheel (with no luck!).

On the upside though, my new website is virtually finished and should go live next week. But of course I am STILL waiting for my shipment from Nepal so don't want to publish the site until it has got all of the new goodies on it. And the felt balls that I've started selling are extremely popular - I've had 3 orders for large quantities of balls this week alone, along with an enquiry for a very large order from a jewellery designer in New York. Hopefully she'll like the samples I'm going to send her, and will place a lovely big order.

I hope you've all had a better week than me.

Sarah x

There's a hole in the roof ....

... and the rain's coming in !!!

What a nightmare - we've got buckets lined up catching it all because the roof guy can't come until tomorrow - arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

That's it for today I'm afraid - the buckets need emptying !

Sarah x

Post Christmas Blues

Oh dear - after having a lovely Christmas and New Year the horrible bugs and colds that are working their way around the country have landed in our house. Sam's first day back at school was on Tuesday and today (Thursday) he is off sick with a flu bug. Fortunately the sickness bug that has been doing the rounds at his school hasn't got to us and I'm keeping everything crossed that it doesn't.

So today I have 2 little monkeys at home with me, which isn't really helping me to get my new Felt venture off the ground. Grace had Tumble Tots this morning which she absolutely loves, but we had to take Sam with us as well, and the poor little thing just sat there in the corner looking all sorry for himself. He really is ill because he didn't even want to play his hand-held computer game that Father Christmas bought him !

I haven't managed to get any crafting at all done lately because I've had a bit of a splurge and splashed out on a new website which is taking me forever to load up. Once it's up and running, it will look exactly the same as the current site (which is still live and you are still able to purchase from), and will work virtually the same but will be more user-friendly from a payment point of view. It's also much easier for me to keep up to date and for stock control purposes - so hopefully everyone's a winner !!

Sadly my latest shipment from Nepal hasn't arrived so I can't show you any sneaky peeks, but I promise to post some pics on here once it does arrive.

BTW - I've managed to update the header on this blog to "Blooming Felt" and also my user name, so if any of you lovely readers are kind enough to have me on your blog lists, you might want to update me to "Blooming Felt" instead of "Picture it in Stitches". Thank you !!

Enjoy the rest of your week and I hope the bugs don't get to you !!

Sarah x

Moo !!!

They came !!!

My first purchase of 2008 was some of the wonderful little cards known as "Moo" cards and they arrived yesterday.

I'm sooooo pleased with them, even though a couple of my photos are a little dark, the cards still look pretty darn good ... even if I do say so myself !

Last night I also bought 500 custom woven labels from Etsy. Fingers crossed they too will look fantastic when they arrive - I always worry about buying stuff "blind" from the internet, but fortunately most of the stuff arrives looking absolutely gorgeous.

I also placed an order for some gorgeous green and pink felt with paper-and-string. It seems silly I know, there's me with a website selling loads of felt items and I go buying sheets of felt from elsewhere !! Mind you, in amongst my latest shipment from Nepal should be something rather exciting of the felt sheets variety - I don't want to tell you too much about it just yet (in case it turns out to be not quite what I was expecting ... see, it's that buying "blind" effect again !!), but if it is what I was expecting, be sure to check out my next blog post and also my website.

I've been busy, busy, busy redesigning and re-ordering my website. I think the structure is pretty much there now and I just need to load lots of lovely new goodies onto the site. I'm awaiting a delivery of my latest designs from Nepal and have been told it will be with me before the 10th January, so that is yet another thing that I am very excited about.

Because I haven't got any pictures of new felt goodies to show you, (I've been trying to restock my shop and also my NOTHS store with my standard stock) I thought I would show you a couple of the lovely books I received at Christmas. Both are extremely interesting reads and I can highly recommend them.

While I think about it, I am considering doing the Country Living Christmas Fair in December and would love to hear from anyone who has exhibited at one of the Chrismas Fair's in the past. Samantha at Plump Pudding did the Spring Fair last year and very kindly gave me the low-down on it all, but I would be interested to hear your comments about the Christmas Fair.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend !

Sarah x