Crafty Attic

Do you remember recently that I posted about a site called Heartsy? Well, Heartsy has now mostly shifted away from handmade/independent sellers and a new site called Crafty Attic is picking up where Heartsy left off. With a provisional launch date of 1 September, Crafty Attic looks like another interesting prospect for us crafty thrifty types - keep your eyes peeled for more news!

Another lovely person with an amazing sale on...

Miss Kapow! How could I not notice your incredibly generous sale over on Folksy at the moment! Now I've had my pick of lovely things (mwah ha ha), everyone else, have at it!


You won't be disappointed :) Not with offbeat and laugh out loud funny cards like these Creepy Christmas numbers... Even Radio 1 was playing that song at teatime the other day, you can't help but sing along.

Summer sales

Glasgow crafters Glitterysah and Asking For Trouble are having some very generous sale offers at the moment, now is a great time to add to your stash of gifts for those last-minute birthday panic moments!

I love Sah's zip up purse, a snip at only £4, and this Asking for Trouble button bag - I'm really into this lovely shade of fresh blue right now!

The Titchables clearance sale rolls on, now with much reduced stock but an increased 50% discount, using code sale50 at checkout.

And if you're looking to stock up on yarn, take a look in the Life Craft eBay outlet.

Anyone else having a sale right now for me to take a look at?

Done and done

Just in time for the new arrival, the blanket is done and ready to pop in the post. Now all I hope is that the postman knocking doesn't interrupt any precious moments of sleep! My new nephew arrived last night, just as I'd opened the last bottle of champagne from our wedding, perfect timing!

Nearly there...

The blanket I'm working on for my new nephew (due any day) is almost there...

Wedding season

As summer is well and truly underway in this part of the world (not that you'd know from the photo above, taken in my very sunny craft room), I've been inspired to update my confetti packaging. And in turn, this confetti update has inspired how I package and send all of my goodies!

Of course, the beauty of this is that I can update the labels with whatever text you like - the names and wedding date of the lucky couple in the case of confetti, or a message for the recipient if you're buying a set of notecards for a gift. I can even switch up the twine colours to match what's hiding inside.

Now my confetti looks much more appealing, I'll be showing you a lot more of it in my shop. I have to admit getting a bit carried away with the punches when I wasn't very mobile last year, but didn't have the concentration to knit or sew. I love the idea of having the confetti I made from a damaged French romance novel at a wedding, so much fun to pick the pieces off each other and have a nosy at the words! I love that soupir is hiding in there - ahhhhh!

When life hands you lemons...

A new-ish treasury

New in the shop!

These gorgeous little envelopes and matching embellished flat cards are available in the girlindustries etsy shop right now! At $4 for a set of 5, they come in at a dinky 7 x 11cm, or 4 1/4 x 2 7/8 inches.

Upcycled from a day to a page calendar, each set of five notecards includes a variety of cats and background colours in each set.

A day in the life

It's that time again, Claire has called us to action to produce another Day in the Life post. I took part once before, last February. Catch up with other contributors, Catherine, Marceline and Laura (amongst many others, it's even happening over in Brooklyn) and take part if you like!

3.55am Wake up to hear the battery low alert in the baby monitor. Plug it back in and amble dangerously back to bed. I don't really do half asleep.

6.12am Wake up again, this time it's the baby asking me to nip upstairs and get her. In the universal language of pre-speech infants. Which is loud and irritating so I drag myself out of bed in a bid to make it stop. We settle in bed and I spend the next half an hour keeping her away from my glasses, my iPod, my book and everything else that is on my bedside table.

6.42am I am relieved from crawl-preventing duties by my husband and nip downstairs to make coffee and milk. We have our drinks in bed while we watch all the latest from the Island of Sodor, where the trains are slightly more efficient than Scotrail and make it to their final destination without the use of a bus replacement service. Which was yesterday's special adventure.

7.52am I am showered, breakfasted and dressed in the lovely giraffe t-shirt I bought in Portland, OR on honeymoon (it still fits! it still kind of fits!), by coincidence, Phil has dressed Amelia in her giraffe t-shirt, and we head off to the childminder's farm, where Amelia is spending the day in preparation for my return to work next month.

8.10am I get the weekly shop in at our local supermarket. Included is a big box of Lemsips as me and the husband continue to shake off bad colds. In the middle of summer. I also buy six packs of Stoats porridge bars as I really admire the guy who set the company up in Edinburgh around the time I was graduating and moving on to big retail, and they are reduced to 49p for five flapjacks, with a use by date of September. Result! Interesting fact: we were going to have Stoats bars as our wedding favours if we hadn't found The Other Mousie to make pirate kitties for us instead!

8.40am Unpack the shopping, and a few scooped up random items from the car - including a handknitted baby blanket, and a toy owl I made on Saturday night. Tidy the living room, including putting away random bits of owl for future owl making purposes.

9.05am Race upstairs to get some details on an eBay item I'm selling that finishes in ten minutes, for a last minute question-asker. Race back downstairs to post the details on the listing, just in the nick of time. It is a sample size Clinique lip gloss and it netted me £1.74, from a person with 'giraffe' in their user name. Today is too giraffey by far and it's only just gone 9am.

9.20am I package up 10 items I've sold over the course of the weekend and fill out a proof of posting form. So far my day is incredibly exciting, so I go for a cup of tea and a sit down. I'm knitting a baby blanket for my sister with Rowan Calmer yarn, the same kind of yarn used in the blanket I made for Amelia last year. My new nephew is due to arrive any day so I'm not entirely sure why I started this yesterday and not six months ago but hey ho. It's a big departure for me with bright bold boyish colours, and I enjoy working on the first few stripes as the pattern unfolds.

11am I realise the time and consider leaving the couch. I pick up my laptop and impulse buy two sets of vintage fabric remnants from Etsy seller Rope, that I was eyeing up on Sunday. I make a treasury based around zines and coffee, and wish I could afford to buy all the zines on this list.

11.45am I realise the time and run upstairs to my craft room to finish off the last zine in the Answers on a Postcard series. I format the pages into PDFs and zap them downstairs for my husband to print off on the supercomputer. My printer upstairs needs new ink and I keep forgetting to pick some up.

12.47pm Time to make lunch and maybe dose up on another Lemsip. We're having chicken pasties with mash and gravy. Yum! After we've eaten I tidy up the kitchen and wait for my New York friend Sabrina to phone for a catch up.

2pm I settle down for a bit more knitting and a watch of the newish HBO series Treme. I'm up to the last episode having watched the whole first season in the last four days. It's a great programme and I definitely recommend it. Don't wikipedia it to find out more (like I foolishly did, when trying to check whether the location filming for Davis' hotel job was in a hotel I'd stayed in on one of my few weekend trips to NOLA - later on in the series the same hotel is used again and the front door and signage is shown, and yes it was!), there's a terrible spoiler that kind of ruined part of the series for me. One of my favourite actors (Steve Zahn - one of the cast in my favourite film of all time) is in it, and what's more, he sings! There's a great ensemble cast and separate storylines which occasionally interlink. And there is so much wonderful music in it, you can watch it while you work on a craft project and still get loads of enjoyment from it. If you've been to New Orleans, keep your eyes peeled for great location filming, like Preservation Hall, Cafe du Monde, Pat O'Briens, all the usual places.

3.30pm I start to think about finishing up what I need to do, like collect in the recycling bin (today is collection day and our bin is halfway up the street where the council workers left it), check my email for any more orders to send out, quickly write a new home card (from Dude and Chick) for my sister and her family, who are moving house this week as well as anticipating a new arrival any minute!

5pm and I'm home with the baby. We play in the living room for a while before thinking about dinner. Amelia has already had something at her childminder's house, but me and Phil are having her favourite, asparagus, with our dinner, so she joins us at the highchair with a few pieces of asparagus while we have an early-ish dinner at 6.30pm.

9pm and a bit more knitting later, I catch twenty minutes of a TV documentary about Orthodox Jewish people in my home city, Salford. The accents make me feel a bit homesick and I think about going to bed. Just one more stripe of the blanket before I go up with a night-time bottle for Amelia and hope for everyone to have a full night in their own beds.

Disclaimer: I cheated and wrote about Monday because Tuesday my cold turned into the flu and I thought that 10am napped, 11am drank lemsip, 12noon napped through lunch, 2pm more lemsip and a scone because I couldn't face cooking 4pm napped etc was a bit dull

Flash of inspiration!

I feel like giving something back to celebrate finishing my zine project, Answers on a Postcard! Tell me a surprising fact about you that you are willing to share in a teeny-tiny mini zine. You can even remain anonymous if you email me your fact and TELL ME that you want to remain a mystery contributor.

Or post your comment here so we can all see it! Or send it to @girlindustries on Twitter. Email me your postal address so I can send you a free copy once all the responses are compiled. Katy at girlindustries dot com. Do it!

Lovely shopping

I haven't been to the V & A museum in oooh, ages. But I'm signed up to their email news service and love it when news of their shop sales come through. At the moment there are excellent bargains to be had out of season for Christmas decorations with a handmade feel, and I quite often buy stationery from the museum for Christmas presents - they have a great range of designs and I feel good knowing the money is supporting the museum in these troubling times for the arts and public institutions. How wonderful is this memory book, in bright powder blue?

If you stray away from the sales section, you can browse fabric reproductions of vintage designs available by the metre, many of which are also reduced in price. But the sale itself is worth a look, with offers like this felt feather decoration, a snip at 30p! Or a crocheted Christmas tree bauble for just 50p! It's a good reminder that now is the time to be thinking about Christmas stock for our own shops - 2011 is flying past and it'll be Autumn before we know it...

Card making

Can you believe my little girl is nearly a year old? I'm in the middle of making a TV birthday card for her in enough time to send in to Milkshake for her birthday. We're big fans of the sea side at the moment, and of course, Peppa Pig (thank you BT Vision for hour long back-to-back shows without ads, you are cheaper than employing a cleaner) and here she is making sandcastles with her little brother George.

The obligatory photo of the birthday girl will be hiding under the sunshine!

PIF of the week

This week's PIF is a small batch of envelopes I made from a hoarding poster advertising the release of electricity, by Suede. I have a ton of these posters saved in a big tube from my student days and wondered if there's a market for some lovely nostalgic envelopes - I'm viewing the PIF as kind of test marketing!

I've even thrown in a set of co-ordinating grey flatcards. Envelopes measure approximately 7 x 11cm and cards are marginally smaller with rounded corners. Also happening in the etsy shop right now is a bit of a flash summer sale. Use the code TOOHOT40 for 40% off, but hurry because I'll be withdrawing the code at some point this week .

My workspace this week

So with only FOUR weeks to go before I'm officially back at work, I'm trying to finish off as many half-done projects as I can, especially as I've been applying to craft markets for the run up to Christmas!

This week I've mainly been finishing off envelope and notecard sets that I needed new glue in order to complete. There's a specific kind of archival glue that I use which is kind to the paper and really durable, and I had run out. After a mercy dash to WH Smiths last week, all the cut out and scored envelopes can be finished off and packed away. With the offcuts from my envelopes, I try to use as much as I can for confetti shapes and also price tags. Here's a snapshot of (one of) my (three) desk(s) with it all going on!

Eagle-eyed Suede fans, look out for a special PIF on Monday...