What a busy few weeks it has been – Valentine’s Day, a Spring craft fair to prepare for, Mother’s Day and the run up to Easter!  I’ve hardly had time to make all my cards to order, let alone blog!! Apologies to all my blog followers and I hope to resume normal blogging service very shortly. 

My main focus has been developing my Spring collections and I am looking to increase the personalisation I can offer to customers on cards and maybe on knitted items (but I’m not sure quite how I’m going to do that yet).

Adding a personal touch to Valentine’s cards has offered something a little different to my customers. I have trialled this with my colleagues at work and they have reacted well. Giving me ever more weird and wonderful greetings / names to add on to their chosen cards. I think my favourite was the card pictured.

I have continued to add personalised greetings to my Mother’s Day cards and will carry on for all my future card collections.

I have recently been concentrating on my hearts and flowers collections and have expanded this with a small number of sunflower cards for Mother’s Day. Always being one to try and reuse as many items as possible, I made use of a broken umbrella and the lovely sunflowers that adorned it. I was devastated when it broke, but I have had additional pleasure crafting with the parts!! This provided me with 8 beautiful large sunflowers.

The colours of the flowers are so cheerful, so I raided my ever expanding card and paper stash to find something beautiful to co-ordinate with them. I’ve used some Hunkydory foiled and embossed cardstock in dark brown, bright green card from Create and Craft, yellow flower embossed card from Paperbox and some gold mirri card. Instead of using my traditional straight line framing, I have used my most recent purchases – some circle and scalloped circle nesting dies from Spellbinders.

Do you like them? They certainly make me smile.

I’ve been asked to do a few other cards as well for specific occasions, one for a friend and another for a colleague who has moved house.

These flowers would certainly cheer me up. How about you? Let me know what you think……

Happy crafting
x

Spring is in the air and so is my first craft fair of 2013.  It’s now time to make sure I have plenty of stock available!

One of my New Year resolutions was to do at least 4 craft fairs this year, I think one a quarter should do nicely.  So my first one at the beginning of March will hopefully coincide with a turn in the weather to a warm dry Spring!

The fair is being held at

North Manchester Reform, Elms St, Whitefield, Manchester, M45 8GQ (opposite Morrisons)

Sunday March 3rd from 10am – 3:30pm. 

Just in time for Mother’s Day and in plenty of time for Easter.  So do come along and say hello if you’re in the area.  I’d love to see you.

Happy crafting

x

I’ve had a busy run up to Valentine’s Day this year and thank all of my new and returning customers for their purchases. 

I took several orders for cards to be personalised for loved ones.  My favourite being this one below.

My husband even made a card for me this year!

I wish you all a Happy Valentine’s Day.

K x

That favourite spring celebration of all our Mums is fast approaching.  This year it’s Sunday 10th March.

I’ve been trying to get a head start on my Mother’s Day cards and my earlier launch of the hearts and flowers cards has helped.  But I really want to expand on these flowers, using other colours and materials rather than just paper.  I’ve experimented with more patterns already and the Papermania capsule collections make matching differing designs quite straight forward.  I love the simplicity of the single flower on a plain white card, with complementary hand drawn borders on the card, insert and envelopes.  However, I want to take this further.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been thinking about this and how I can use flowers more, particularly for Mother’s Day.  So I’ve been looking at my ever popular handbag cards and thinking about adding the flowers as embellishments on a collection of ‘designer’ handbags, just for Mother’s Day.

I also want to do some experiments with fabrics.  I bought some beautiful offcuts of vintage fabrics from Nathalie at the U in cute and I think these will make some stunning card embellishments.  I may take this one step further and turn the flower into a small brooch attached to the card, making both a card and gift in one!  I’d already been thinking about this for crochet and knitted flowers and hearts, however, I need to keep practicing my crochet (my first attempt at a flower was somewhat disappointing).

So I think it’s going to be a busy few weeks of making designer handbags and paper flowers, and practicing my crochet some more.  And added to my list for the future os to get out the needles, thread and fabric.  It’s got to be worth a few experiments!

Happy crafting

xx

Last weekend I finally found a couple of hours with little on the tv and no particular project to do.  So I hunted out my newly purchased crochet hook – bought for the princely sum of £1 from the Wool Stall on Bury Market.

Having watched the beginners crochet show on Create and Craft and read loads of advice, I was hoping to get a 4mm hook.  Alas I have been unable to find one, so I got a 3.5mm hook instead.  It’ll have to do for now!

I then had a root through my huge bag of yarn and plumped for a multi-colour dk yarn – very cheerful!  Out came my ‘learn to crochet’ book and my memory of the shows I’d recently seen on tv.

As a reasonably experienced knitter and with all the advice I’d had, I thought it would be intuitive, but I’ve found holding the hook quite difficult.  I started on the chain stitch.  It took a few efforts before I was happy with the appearance.  It’s true that having tight stitches makes it harder to thread the hook through, but finding a happy medium between too tight and too loose is proving frustrating.  For some reason the book moves striaght from the chain into treble crochet stitches, which seems strange to me as a novice – maybe it will all become clear later! Trying to understand where the put the hook through was interesting!!

I managed about an hour or so of stitching in all and had a small piece of crochet fabric to show for it.  (3 rows and 1 chain).  Next stop casting off – is it even called that in crochet and is it really as simple as threading the end of the yarn through the last loop?

Since then I’ve managed a few spare moments to keep practicing.  I took it to work on Wednesday and managed another couple of rows over lunch. And after an hour on Thursday I had a square of treble crochet!! What do you think?

And I now have a project in mind for my practice rows – 80s style bracelets for the 80s themed party I’m going to next weekend!  Bring on the New Romantic vibe – I have my outfit planned and I may even post a pic if it works out!!

Happy crafting

Kath  x

The winner of the prize draw for new followers is

Lyndsey Brumby

Congratulations Lyndsey.  Please have a look at my for sale gallery to choose your prize.

Thank you to everyone that has liked my facebook page and my website.

There’s no end of reading material out there for crafters.  I’ve always got something on the go, but I also like to balance my craft reading with something escapist. 

Currently I have John Taylor’s autobiography “In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran” on the go.  (This says a lot about my youth – I’m an 80’s girl still and loved Duran Duran).  This is a great change from my other reading material of the moment “How to grow your handmade business” by Kari Chapin.  I’m finding this one quite hard going and it’s not helped for me as it’s American, but the principles are the same wherever you are.

I’ve read quite a few of the books, magazines and booklets available and find they all have plenty of advice and examples to help with ideas and problems,  They are great reading for the daily work commute (when you remember to put them in your bag!)

My favourite reading of the moment has to be Craftseller magazine.  It’s a great mix of advice on how to sell your work, inspirational pieces by other sellers and there are some fabulous crafting ideas to make and sell.  It covers all sorts of handmade crafts from knitting and sewing to soap making and screen printing.  And they have some great gifts every month too.  I didn’t get my much wanted subscription for Christmas, so I’ve just treated myself instead!  I can’t wait for my first subscribed issue to arrive in a couple of weeks time.

If you have a free moment, check out some of the crafting titles out there, you never know what inspiration you may find!

Happy reading
x

I’m currently working on updating my website.  You may have noticed there are several ‘under construction’ comments on pages at the moment.  It’s come as a result of my 6 month review over Christmas and New Year. 

I sent all of my customers a short questionnaire about their purchase looking at quality, value for money and customer service, and then asked for views of the website (whether or not they had used it to make their purchase).

It was a very positive experience reading through all of the responses, several of which you can see on the testimonials page.  Getting different perspectives on the site is vital if this venture is to be successful. It’s also fun and interesting to see what people find important and what I can do to improve the site features and their experiences when using the site.

I’ve already made a few minor changes – moving the ‘for sale’ gallery to the top of this gallery list and making it a more obvious link.  I’m also adding some captions to card pictures where I can.  I’ve updated my links page too.  The major change is to the ‘for sale’ gallery layout, so keep watching and let me know what you think of the new format.

Thanks go to everyone that responded to my feedback request.  If you have any other comments, please feel free to let me know.

Happy crafting
x

I thought I’d run a little competition for my new followers.

The prize – a card of your choice from my sale gallery. Valentine / Birthday, whatever you would like. Take a look at my for sale gallery (regularly updated).

All you need to do is like and share the handmadebykatherine facebook page or handmadebykatherine website. If you’ve already liked both my website and facebook page, leave a comment on any of my blog entries and share this post.

I will draw a name at random from all entries on Feb 1st 2013.

Good luck

Katherine
xx

Whilst sitting on the bus, stuck in snow on the way to work yesterday, I started thinking about how much time I was wasting. Just sat. Doing nothing (except thinking of course). Not having invested in a smart phone or tablet, I was unable to fully explore my crafty thoughts. So I set to work (mentally) blogging and making a ‘to do list’.

Predictably, by the time I’d arrived at work, I’d forgotten everything! However, I resolved to have a pad and pen in my handbag at all times! Just in case I have a brainwave or I get stuck in the snow on the bus again!

Now the tram is different, I don’t feel I waste my commuting time there. Once on the tram I have 45 minutes to blissfully update myself with whatever reading material I have available. This week it’s been the latest issue of Craftseller magazine and its’ freebie ‘Start up Guide’. I have found inspiration and advice which is helping me pursue setting up in business, as well as great ideas of products to make. My only problem now is finding the time to do all the necessary research and to learn and make all the projects!!

I think my main learning from my reading this week is to focus my products and try not to have too many ideas running through my head, not getting anywhere. So I shall take that pen and paper and write down all my ideas. If I don’t get round to them for a while, then at least I’ve got them stored for the future!

Commuting doesn’t have to be wasted time. I just need to find crafty ways to fill the time!

Typically I had to stand up all the way home today so I was unable to do any reading let alone writing of ideas!

Happy crafty commuting
xx