Happy 4th!

Patriotic buttons by ThisOnesMineDesigns on Etsy

I thought I'd help celebrate what I just heard described as 'the day the UK and America had a break-up' by doing the blog equivalent of 'drunk-dialing' to reminisce about old times.  Sorry for the lack of photos - you'll have to go clicky on the links.

Here's the first half of a list of my top ten places to visit in the States, and why I like them...

Fannette Island

I took an afternoon cruise around Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe back in July 1999, and was told about an English eccentric who built a castle on the island and had her butler row her out there every day to take afternoon tea.

With a little investigation, this lovely vignette turns out to be somewhere on the scale between borderline and absolute CLAPTRAP but it's a great story and the real information behind the place is just as interesting.

Lake Tahoe is on the border between Nevada and California, and my friend Jo and I were actually there to see Tom Jones. We weren't disappointed! Although the flight into town from Las Vegas, over the mountains in a single engine plane, was pretty hairy.

Lost River Caves, near Bowling Green

Apart from playing a key role in the American Civil War, and also being the rumoured hideout of outlaws like Jesse James, the best thing about this place is the fact that it was used as an underground (literally and perhaps figuratively) nightclub back in the 1930s. A bar area is hewn into the rock and there's a substantial dancefloor area too. Our tour guide when we visited (me and Jo again, but this time in July 2007) told us that the advent of air conditioning alongside laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol did for the bar in the end, but it's great that it's been restored and kept so well - a really interesting day out.

The Intersection of 1st and 1st, East Village, New York

Before I even noticed this wonderful hidden gem, this particular intersection has some great memories for me. These are mainly to do with shrugging off hangovers on the way to the 2AV station to catch the ever-useful F train, drinking coffee outside in snow or heat to wake me up for a day's shopping or sightseeing or trying to fortify myself for a day out with family! It's just around the corner from the storefront radio station, EVR.com where you can see Mark Ronson, Andy Rourke and other well-known musicians broadcasting all day every day. I've spotted everyone from Moby to Chris Klein and overheard all sorts of bizarre conversations right here - 'you've lived in New York your whole life and you never ate felafel? We're going for felafel RIGHT NOW' - three club kids heading into SoHo at 6.30am, presumably heading for home but with breakfast first. I also had to chuckle to myself as I overheard a girl chatting to her dachshund, Nathan - great name for a sausage dog! And you know where the F train goes... Coney Island! I think that's synchronicity (or something...)

Mount Hood, Oregon

I think I've probably mentioned this place to everyone I know at least one time too many, now, but I can't recommend it highly enough! On our honeymoon, the husband and I drove up the first 6000ft of the mountain, as I'd heard about the brunch at Timberline Lodge on the internet and wanted to give it a try. As soon as we arrived, we changed our plans, we were going to stay! After the super-helpful reception staff gave us a mini-tour of the rooms available that night, we splashed out on a lovely little room near the bar bwah ha ha. Best spur of the moment decision ever. The scenery, the facilities (outdoor swimming pool!), the staff, the restaurant, the bar, the brunch (wow, the the bloody mary here is excellent), the history (and I'm not just talking about the exterior shots for The Shining, or Roosevelt's visit in the 30s) and if I hadn't pretty much ruled skiiing out of my life when I realised quite how accident prone I am without the added bonuses of snow and sheer drops, I'm sure I'd love the outdoor pursuits available almost year round, too.

Roosevelt Island
Okay, so like many of my working days in midtown, I'm back to the F train. I spent New Year's Day 2006 exploring Roosevelt Island with my cousin and his wife (who just had a baby daughter on Monday - hooray!). All of us had worked in midtown only blocks from the island, but none of us had ever made the trip across on the tram (or cable cars, as I would call them). At that time, gentrification was just beginning, and new apartment buildings were springing up or being sold off plan. We walked a full circuit of the manmade island, and managed to spy plenty of cool sights, like an abandoned and empty swimming pool (this photo by Alex Guidouk is so much better than the one I took), the former hospital at the south end of the island that was used in the creepy Dark Water movie, and even managed to fit in some time for delicious lemon meringue at a diner, yum yum.

So those are my first five....

More to come!

Day in the life 14 August

Nominated by Julie, and as part of Claire's project, today is time for another Day in the Life post. Phew, two in two months! Today is the last day of freedom before I go back to full time work in the morning, so it's a pretty momentous occasion. I haven't been to my day job since 18 May last year when I was in receipt of some pretty scary blue light medical care and subsequently signed off work for the rest of my pregnancy. My lovely little girl will be 1 next week, and my fantastic childminder returns from her summer holidays in the morning, so it's back to work for me.

My poor old cat is quite unwell, so after some emergency treatment yesterday, he needs to go back for another antibiotic injection and a good check over. As usual, he got an infected abscess, this time above his left front leg. He is either just standing there taking a beating from whatever is fighting with him, or he's letting them get in the first swipe before he totals them. Last time it was his face, just missing his eye, the time before that, it was the front of his left leg. We've caught him squaring up to a pit bull before now, so nothing would surprise me.

So I was determined to make the most of today and we had a great time. Here's what happened.

7.30am we all wake up, get washed, dressed and eat breakfast. By 10am we are in the car and ready to go. Amelia has been dressed by her daddy in a cool blue t-shirt, beige combats, her new grey jumper that we got in Salford earlier this week (my mum gave it us and it *was* paid for, thank you very much) and even a pair of shoes.

10.10am I forgot to buy mayo yesterday so we cheat and buy pre-made sandwiches from Tesco on our way. We are off to the Scottish Deer Centre for a picnic and to feed the animals.

10.20am We are properly on our way now, and we drive along the A91 towards St Andrews. We pass Balado, home of T in the Park, and we smile at the aeroplane in the field. I catch up on yesterday's newspaper, and I'm delighted to hear that actress Katherine Parkinson was a grade A geek growing up, with a penchant for wearing medieval dress, from age 14 to about 21. Brilliant. I am less delighted to read the Family section, where usually brilliant advice giver Annalisa Barbieri implies that domestic abuse is not domestic abuse unless it is violent, and that anyone suffering abuse should be left alone to sort it out themselves, as they are adults and deserve not to have their private lives interfered with. I think that this is possibly some of the worst advice ever given and this puts a bit of a downer on my morning. I put the paper down and concentrate on the lovely North Fife Tourist Trail scenery.

11.10am We're here! Down to the serious stuff first, time for a coffee and a biscuit and a quick mooch around the gift shop before we go into the Deer Centre proper. Priorities, people.

12noon and we're in, just in time for the Birds of Prey demonstration. An owl lands on our picnic table. A hawk eats some unidentifiable bits of chicken a bit too close to us for comfort. A very young kestrel gets every instruction wrong and messes up the last bit of the presentation in a quite adorable way.

12.30pm and we settle in a clearing near to the wildcats for our picnic. My husband's head is looking pretty sunburnt and we decide to break out the picnic blanket under a shady tree. Just as well as the heavens open and we eat good old traditional British damp Quavers and sandwiches. After all that, the "healthy eating" sandwiches are made with yogurt instead of mayonnaise and taste very odd. Excellent. We change the baby's nappy on the picnic blanket in the rain (oh the glamour!) and get the footmuff out in time for the sun to burn through again and we take the footmuff off the pushchair again. We move on to feed the sheep before another weather-based intervention has to take place.

1.20pm and the sheep are eating food pellets (bought from the Deer Centre) from my hand. We see reindeer, the fox enclosure (but no foxes) and I take Amelia up on the elevated wooden squirrel walk, from which we see a coathanger and a man picking his nose, but no squirrels.

2.10pm and a go on the squashed penny machine later, we're out of there. A sleeps in the car while we nip along to Balgove Farmers Shop and Cafe for a cheeky afternoon tea and a bit of posh food shopping.

4pm and we're back on the road home, ready for the evening rigmarole of Amelia's dinner, bathtime, story and bedtime. This takes us up to 7.20pm, when I cook bacon cheese burgers, using Balgove bacon and local cheese, Red Anster. It's a cross between Red Leicester and Cheshire, with added garlic and chives, and tastes lovely. Fittingly, for this kind of dinner, the Radio 4 show Americana is playing in the background as I cook and we eat. I learn about the stock exchange in Chicago, which as you'd expect from the mid-west, is much like our corn exchanges from years past.

I pop upstairs at 8pm to resettle the baby, who has woken up. While I'm up on the top floor (we have two bedrooms in what used to be the loft), I nip into my craft room and spend nearly an hour creasing and folding around 40 envelopes in preparation for an extra trim and some gluing tomorrow evening. When I pop the TV on at 8.47 downstairs, I kick myself that I've missed the best part of Dragon's Den, but I lighten up when I realise there's a new series of Young, Dumb and Living off Mum on BBC3. This is trashy reality TV of the best kind - with a sarcastic Robert Webb voiceover - and makes me glad to be in a proper job. One of the types of work experience they are sent on this week is cleaning a youth hostel - something I once did over a summer in Edinburgh and would not like to do again. The University rents out its student accommodation over the summer and it's managed by the Scottish Youth Hostel Association. By strange co-incidence I ended up cleaning in my old building, and even my old bedroom, overlooking the Pleasance Courtyard. I had to stop when a stag party tarred and feathered their groom in one of the flats, using treacle and a burst pillow. I'm very very very allergic to feathers when they aren't on birds, and found myself unable to breathe, a horrible experience. I actually quite enjoyed the cleaning aspect of the job, and the methodical completion of repetitive tasks was very relaxing. I was actually working three jobs that summer (an office job collating and summarising media reports of British defence contracts for the MOD and a customer services supervisor at Sainsburys, too), as I had to make up for lost time when I couldn't work during term time while I was living in Paris.

10pm and I have a Green and Blacks hot chocolate before bed. Yikes, a new era begins tomorrow, I'd better get a good sleep!

Treasury feature: strings

I've been lucky to find girlindustries items in a few treasuries this week - thank you to everyone who comments on and browses these lists, and a huge thank you to the lovely people who compile them.

Taking stock...

Warning: this is going to be one of those posts all about me. Skip it or indulge me, your choice :)


I go back to my full time day job in two weeks today. Gosh. The last fifteen months have been extremely challenging, more so than I ever imagined. Some of the misconceptions that I had about pregnancy, babies and life as a parent have been blown completely out of the water. Before I had a baby, the only people I'd ever really spoken to about all that stuff had had fairly straightforward pregnancies, and births, and where things had become a little complicated, had received appropriate and timely medical care. I certainly had never known anyone spend the last six months of pregnancy and first six months of their child's life unable to stand for longer than 20 minutes and unable to walk further than one side of their house to the other. I thought babies slept 16 hours a day when newborn, and could be awake and not crying simultaneously, at least some of the time.

I knew the phrase 'you're pregnant, not disabled' wasn't a nice thing to say, but I didn't know you could become disabled from being pregnant or having a mismanaged delivery. I didn't know I wouldn't be able to even walk to a local shop for a pint of milk or to the playground on the other side of my back garden so my baby could go on the swings until she was 9 months old. I really never thought I'd be the kind of person who depended on a car to get around. I also didn't think I'd be the kind of person who would feel jealous of someone walking to collect their older child from school the day after they'd had a baby, when the day after I'd had a baby I was hooked up to all kinds of drips, drains and who knows what else, wondering if I'd ever live long enough to walk my child to school.


What I did know was that I was always going to go back to work - I'm even more determined to help make a difference to people who work in and use NHS services now - and that I will manage to balance being a mum, a wife, a friend and an employee with having some kind of social life and keeping my businesses going, as well as planning for another idea I have up my sleeve. Now just to think of what to say when everyone asks me did I enjoy my 'year off'. I always have the instinct to go a bit 1920s in these circumstances 'the heart failure, major surgery and feelings of having to conform to societal expectations of a new mother were a crashing bore, but that aside, just tickety boo, thanks'.


Luckily, I have just two short weeks to dwell on this, well, two weeks of nap times, anyway. In other news, I've made some new envelopes, and normal service will be resumed in my next post. Hurrah!

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!

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...

Craftseller

My lovely husband brought me a little present with the weekly shop on Saturday morning, the first edition of this brand new glossy magazine. Even better, it was presented with the thoughtful comment 'this is not because I think you need help to sell things, I just thought it was more interesting than getting you Hello magazine or something'. Ahhhh.

I really enjoyed looking through this magazine and hope it progresses to give lots more advice and support for those of us selling crafts in person and online. At the moment it's very focused on how to set up a business, and gives lots of patterns which the designers have given permission to sell - very unusual for a craft magazine! I don't think I'll be making anything directly from the magazine but it does have lots of great tips for suppliers and supplies, packaging, photography and presentation that I found really useful. I did get a bit huffy when I noticed the 'monster knits' tutorial for a phone pocket (on the bottom right of the photo) was very similar to how I remembered the DS pouch I made as a gift in 2009, but then I always have to remind myself that four people invented photography at about the same time and my monster was a home-made version of a well known Japanese creation so who am I to criticise!

Each of the projects are rated for skill level and most of them are easy, so if you do fancy having a go, I can recommend it. There is the usual blend of inspirational success stories from established craft entrepreneurs and advice from Etsy UK staff, too. There was a free gift of 'professional stickers' to finish off your crafty creations but I they were all pastelly colours and they wouldn't have tempted me to pick up the magazine any more than the content. I think a more useful gift would have been advice on how to design your own packaging and a link to some free collage sheets or fonts or similar but then, I am sure those new to crafting may have found a quick fix even more enticing. All in all, a good read, and I'll be interested to see if the magazine develops to cater for crafters at a more advanced stage of making and selling their own self-designed wares.

Postcard pals

I took part in a really cool snail mail swap organised by Claire of Miso Funky last month. I was so excited when my post card arrived! Molly sent me a tea and flowers themed card - you can never have enough of either tea or flowers in my opinion, so I was delighted to receive it and will be putting it up in my craft room to remind me to take a break now and again.

I also made a new Twitter friend when Liz, cake maker extraordinaire, received my geeky Popeye fold and mail notelet, too. I used to love sending letters to my penfriends Martine, Elin and Olivia when I was a teenager - although I cringe to think what I must have written. Yikes! Luckily I'm still in touch with them via Facebook so it can't have been that bad :)

I hope Claire does another swap soon - I still have a huge postcard and notepaper collection that I'd love to put to good use. Not too mention a good few upcycled envelopes... You can find one or two of my favourites in each of my paper destash boxes. It's all good stuff in there!

Swirlyarts and Gniwle are winners!

Random.org has chosen a pair of lucky winners. A Pear lip lust is on its way to Lynsey of Swirlyarts and Gniwle has won the Bettie lip lust - Gniwle I need your address so I can put your winnings in the post - email me at katy at girlindustries dot com to get things rolling. Thank you everyone for playing along and if you wish to treat yourself to anything in my shop, have yourself a little WINNER discount code for 25% percent off, which is valid until 10 June.

Giveaway reminder and a big thank you

There's still time to enter the competition to win a Haunt lip lust. Just click here for info and post a comment on the original post by midnight UK time on the 31st May!

Also I'd like to say a huge thank you to my lovely friends and readers who have voted for me over on Heartsy. I have another 6 days to wait for the decision on whether I'll be featured in a deal, during which time my vote is still live, so you aren't too late if you'd like to give it a shot. Either go directly to Heartsy.me, sign up and click on my deal, or go direct via this (affiliate) link which will get you $5 off if you decide to buy one of the daily deals.

Unfinished business

Nothing quite focuses the mind like knowing you're back at your day job in 12 weeks, and your MSc dissertation is due just after Christmas. In the meantime, I have a ton of unfinished projects around the house, some for home, some for Girl Industries and I really need to pull my finger out and get them finished. One of the projects I've been working on for a while is a rag rug for Amelia's room.

In true upcycling style, it uses worn out t-shirts from all of the family that we really couldn't have given to the charity shop or popped into the Salvation Army hopper at the supermarket. I've just about finished chopping up all the t-shirts, and the next steps are:

Check there are no more t-shirts to use up.
Chop up all remaining useable t-shirts.
Decide on size of rug and cut rug canvas to size.
Use spare canvas offcuts for a bit of a practice.
Go at it on the main canvas.

I'm not knitting as much these days as I find most of my crafting time is in the evening and is often interrupted. Amelia is pretty good at going to bed and falling asleep, but occasionally is woken by the light-ish nights, noises outdoors (curse you, ice cream vans), or a runny nose, or the threat of teeth coming through. So it have to work on something that is easy to put down and even easier to put away. As she gets more mobile, the putting away aspect is going to become even more important, wish me luck! I'll try and keep you updated on the rug as it develops, but if it's anything like the still unfinished but in constant use curtain I made for our front door, you could be waiting a while!

Collective craft buying with Heartsy

I'm sure you can't use the internet these days without stumbling across collective buyer sites like Groupon, Itison, and the like. It's no different in the crafting sphere, with new site heartsy.me. However, there's a twist in the heartsy process, deals are juried by site users and of the 20 or so submissions received daily, only 4-6 make it in to the daily newsletter and deals.

I'd had a few referrals show up in Google Analytics from heartsy but it was only recently I did a bit more investigating, and of course, had to submit my own deal for consideration. If you want to vote for me and take part in other prospective deals (clicking on whether you like the sound of a deal or not does get pretty addictive!) you can sign up here. This is a referral link, so you should get $5 for signing up, redeemable against a future deal, as should I.

You do need to sign in to be able to vote on specific deals, as well as to see those deals running today, but if you'd like to do this without taking part in the referral programme, go straight to heartsy.me, or the link to voting for Girl Industries, which is here. You can also sign in via facebook, but personally I'm a little wary of linking anything 'monetised' to facebook. I like to keep my finances and my friends separate!

I'd be delighted if you could vote for me, my pitch is open for the rest of today. If I'm successful, I'll let you know all the about the deal as soon as I can. Hitting 'publish' on this post is breaking me out in a little bit of a cold sweat because the Englishness in me sees asking for votes rather than getting them on my own merit as not quite cricket. And I can't help but feel a little bit like hmmmmm for setting out my stall for Heartsy, while I don't know the outcome of whether I'll be featured. Or maybe I'm just jealous that I never thought to set up something similar first! However... Heartsy is a pretty nifty operation and I did get a great deal on supplies recently via a Heartsy deal so it's worth your while to take a look at what's on offer. It's definitely brought a good few shops to my attention that I may well shop with in future, too. And I do rather like having a website in my life that I can obsessively press F5 on for a few days until the novelty wears off (while I see how my votes stack up!)

Haunt lip lust giveaway

Hi everyone! To celebrate the summer opening of wonderful bath and body emporium, Haunt, I'm giving away two of the shop's wonderful products from my very own stash.

First up is Bettie, a lip lust in a delightfully exotic flavour, evocative of the glamour of days gone by. Secondly we have the fresh zingy flavour of Vanilla Pear, sweet and clean. Both soothe and moisturise your lips, giving them that little extra shine, too.

I'm going to give the pair away separately, so that's one tube for each of TWO LUCKY WINNERS. This is your chance to see what I've been going on about for the last couple of years, Haunt products rock!

But of course once you've perused Erin's shop, to see her description of the two flavours, I'd like you to tell me in the comments here which flavour you'd prefer to win, then hop over to my etsy shop and tell me which of my products you like the best. I'm having a big sort out in my craft room and want to streamline the things I sell, with your input.

Please tweet, blog and repost about this giveaway to your hearts' content and most of all, good luck, I hope you win! Closing date is 30 May at 12 midnight British Summer Time.

UPDATE: Giveaway will remain open until 31 May at midnight due to accidentally putting that date on my update post. I am an official idiot.

Craft destash!

I'm starting an uber-clearout in the countdown to returning to work. First up, on eBay, is a huge chunk of my collection of knitting and papercraft magazines, finishing in fits and starts ('cos that's how I list 'em) over the next 10 days. Just look me up, I'm called Kippersmum - my ginger cat is called Kipper and I thought I would be a memorable name!

I was given a huge partworks collection of crochet and knitting patterns from 1989/90/91 called Creative Needles and I'm selling it off as a 10-pattern lucky dip via my Etsy shop. Coming to both eBay and Etsy will be button packs, trims and ribbons, surplus fabric and more bits and bobs over the next few weeks as I get my craft room organised before I go back to my day job. 11 weeks and counting!

I've also rejigged my craft paper destash item and have 12 sets packaged up and ready to go. Now with 50 different paper ephemera pieces which all fit into a lovely repurposed A5 box for you to keep nice and safe once they arrive instead of loose in a folder or envelope. The collection now includes spare 5 x 7 inch photographs from my travels around the world, including this sepia-tinted shot of the Bethesda Fountain in New York's Central Park, where I used to spend many a happy lunch hour back in the day.

Let my loss be your gain, and stock up on craft goodies while they're at a bargain price. Buy three or more items and I'll refund your postage (UK or international) via PayPal if you mention 'blog' in your notes to seller or a convo before 17 May 2011.

New banner!

So I obtained myself a new banner for my etsy shop and thought you'd like to hear the story behind it. Like most things I seem to buy these days I heard about it first on Twitter. An art student called Mia made it for me, she is charging a dollar a word to write anything within reason in chalk on the pavement. Just click here if you'd like something of your very own. All proceeds go towards paying off her student loans and having finally cleared my (twelve year old) student debt a couple of months ago, I am all for helping someone else on her way to early repayment.

Mia also sells her art through this page on her website. I love her style and there are lots of purposeful and beautiful things to pick from. I particularly like her handmade yet practical playing cards set. Gorgeous!

I'm very tempted to get another message for a very unique birthday greeting for my husband next month, or my little girl's name to frame and put on her bedroom door. Oh the possibilities!

More useful offcuts

In an attempt to make the most of the card I'd bought to go with my handmade envelopes, I saved even the littlest slivers in the hope of giving them new life.

So here in my shop is a limited edition set of bookmarks or gift tags with a teeny heart cutout and the ever popular bakers' twine.

When I was looking for a contrasting book to lay the bookmarks against, I was very pleased with myself to remember this little piece of history, my gran's diary from her days as a Justice of the Peace in Manchester. Not just the ideal colour and size for these photos, but a great trip down memory lane as I'd never got around to looking through it properly after I inherited it when I was a student and living away from home in France. I was surprised to learn that in 1978 (the year after we all went to Russia together when I was only a couple of months old) my Gran also visited Israel and spent Christmas in Spain - exciting times! My gran would have been celebrating her 99th birthday today if she was still with us, what a milestone.

Recycling... almost as much fun as upcycling!

After spending the last 12 weeks getting my flat ready to go on the market, I finally have Mondays and Tuesdays free to work on crafty things (and my dissertation, which I'm determined to finish before I go back to work in July). We have a lovely childminder called Tina who will be looking after Amelia when I go back to work and with all the work I needed to do on the flat and our house, it made sense to start her off a couple of days a week now. Especially before that magical time (around 9 months) when separation anxiety is due to set in. Providing I'm not too tired, I also have time to work in the evenings now, so blogging should be back on track, and tweeting, too.

I'm dying to show you what I'm working on today, but the weather outside is terrible, which means the light in here is awful. I have a lot of unfinished projects that I started when I was pregnant and I'm trying to get them done in some kind of order. I also really want to finish off my zine project as I put so much work into it during 2009 and 2010, as did my interviewees, that this really is my top priority. However, I have to work on it on the computer in my craft room, where all the responses are saved and my scanner/printer is set up. It's a little bit too old to be wireless, unfortunately. And my craft room is not exactly in its most hospitable state at the moment, as you'll know from recent posts.

I'm currently of the frame of mind that Mondays will be happy crafting Mondays, and Tuesdays will be slightly more dull home admin/housework, physio and dissertation days. I will see if I manage to stick to that and don't just find myself pottering in the craft room. Our house is finally starting to come together a little bit more, especially as my husband had a week off last week and we managed a trip to IKEA and to get quite a few jobs around the house done. I'm particularly pleased with him for removing the integrated fridge from our kitchen (never worked properly since we moved in) and replacing it with a recycling centre so that a) I don't have to run out in the rain every ten minutes with a used newspaper or food packaging and b) Little Miss Inquisitive can be kept out of the composting caddy once she gets a bit more mobile! What's particularly pleasing is that now we have somewhere to keep our jute and canvas shopping bags, instead of 'wherever they land'.

New things are on their way for the shop, too, we just need a bit more of last weekend's sunshine before I can get things photographed nicely.

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