Glasgow International Artists Bookfair

Or, what I did at the weekend

I stopped off at the Pushpin Zines table and treated myself to some classic zines from Marceline's collection, and a new bookmark from Pushpin's artist series. 

Little Birds Market, this coming Sunday!

You'll find me upstairs at Sloan's on Sunday for the next Little Birds Market - look! There are my hand-stitched cards in the flyer!

If you can't make it on Sunday (come in through the entrance in Argyle Arcade, you'll find me there from 12-5pm), you can always pick up a set of cards from my Etsy shop.

Ooh, have a look at Cuteable!  My cards were featured there yesterday as well.

Last minute top speed knitting

I really shouldn't be taking the time to blog tonight as I'm on a mission. My friend plays for the West Coast Trojans, an American Football team, and we are hoping to go to their match tomorrow afternoon (Scotstoun, 2.30pm, if anyone's interested!) but I have a horrible feeling it'll be cold.

So after finding some very reasonably priced Sirdar Denim yesterday on a jaunt to Hobbycraft, I thought I could get cracking on a big bulky warm blanket for the little one. I was inspired in part by flicking through the new White Company catalogue last week, as we were ordering new towels in the sale. I noted that the White Company handknit their big blankets in blocks - I thought about potentially buying extra wool to make up additional panels so we can use the blanket in future on A's big girl bed when the time comes, but then realised I need a huge amount of chunky wool sitting around like I need a hole in the head!

Anyhoo, here I am knitting up 8-ply yarn in a lovely blend of browns and white, in a huge basketweave pattern. I feel all zeitgeisty now as this lovely cushion just popped up on Etsy's front page. It's by Laurimuks, who is a fellow knitter right here in Scotland, her work is just lovely.

I'll be back shortly with the pattern for the blanket (my very own!) and some photos. I hope you are all having a lovely evening, and weekend :)

Vintage shopping

A recent arrival in our home is this amazing wooden hippo piggy bank. His little leg pops out of its socket so you can retrieve your pennies!

Amelia is totally spoiled rotten by her grandparents in terms of toys, books and clothes, so I wanted to pick up something for her first birthday that she can treasure for years to come. It's robust enough to stand up to a bit of childhood rough and tumble (obviously it will be staying on the high shelf for a few more years to come) but delicate enough to be taken good care of.

Happy Birthday, little one.

Find me in Sheffield!

I'm returning to my Northern English roots... sort of! The wonderful boutique Vertiline in Love has relocated from Edinburgh to Sheffield. I've been busy putting together a few boxes of new stock for this gorgeous little shop and here are some of the things I've been working on...

New tags... exclusive to Vertiline in this rich green colourway!

New packaging... especially for bricks and mortar retailers so they can price it up in house - and no web address on the packaging, just my business name.

If you are anywhere near Sheffield, or visiting Yorkshire in the next wee while, I can definitely encourage a visit to Vertiline in the Nichols Building. Otherwise, Vertiline will be open for business online shortly!

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?

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

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...

Look what we made!

With the help of Vonnie, at the Life Craft, Amelia took part in her first ever bit of crafting! Like mother like daughter, she likes a bit of stamping, but in Amelia's case, she is so resourceful (and doesn't get spending money yet), she has resorted to using her hands and feet as stamps!



We came away with some lovely grandparent gifts - the ones in the traditional colours - and a lovely teal version for Amelia's newly-painted green and teal bedroom. If you haven't had the chance to get along to the Life Craft yet and you're anywhere near Glasgow, do get yourself or the kids along for some crafting, cake and coffee. It's on Great Western Road next to the Post Office, just a hop, skip and a jump from the Botanic Gardens, on the same side of the road as Oran Mor. As well as drop in pottery painting, a great selection of crafting supplies and of course, amazing home baking, you can get booked on a range of different crafting courses all taught by local experts.

PIF of the week

This week you can get my TP in the park brooch for just the cost of shipping and my Etsy listing fee. My day job colleague Emily helped me come up with this idea to celebrate Music Festival Season (because you can never have too much loo roll at a festival), and as this year's season is in full flow, this is my gift to you!

Buy it now in the Girl Industries Etsy shop.

Some good news and some bad news

Well, I'll get the bad news out of the way first. I wasn't lucky enough to be picked for a Heartsy deal, gaining only 18% of votes from potential buyers (the usual threshold is 28%) but I think it was a pretty valiant effort and I certainly won't be deterred from trying again with a different micro range to test on people. Some sad news, too, Answers on a Postcard zine contributor Titchables (Issue 8, Crafting Spaces, still to be printed!) is closing down her supplies shop on Etsy. Use the code sale40 for a generous additional 40% off her already reasonable prices.





The good news is, I have a fantastic new online stockist over at Scotland-based http://www.ethicsgirls.co.uk/- where the ethos is very much on the reclaimed and recycled...primarily with clothing, but also with gifts, which is where I fit in. Head over there to take a look!

Pushpin Publishing goes live!

My answers on a postcard zines are now also available from new Glasgow-based zine distro Pushpinzines.co.uk. Pushpin is brought to you by the talented designer behind Asking for Trouble and stocks a range of zines from around the world. There's a section for reader reviews, and I'm hoping readers have kind things to say about my attempts at zine-making!

There's a fab travel section on the website and I immediately ordered up this zine about Portland, OR, where Phil and I spent a few days on honeymoon. If I ever visit again, I think I'll do a ton more research before we go, as we didn't really make the most of the places we could have gone to, and didn't enjoy nearly as many of the microbrewed local craft beers as we should have. We did have the most amazing time at the zoo, though, and my husband got to ride on a yellow school bus for the first time - between the offsite car park and the zoo itself - which was one of his highlights of the whole trip. Yes really. Sigh... Anyway, I digress, but I am looking forward to reading the zine and also posting a review. Hurray!

One of the things that makes Pushpin such a great website is that support is also offered should you want to get into making your own zine. A bespoke service is available, to help you with all the design and layout issues of making a zine, amongst other things which you can ask Marceline all about, or if you just want to dip in a toe, you can invest in Marceline's Let's Make Zines minizine, which is a bargain at just a pound. After being involved in writing, design and making zines for oooh, about 20 years at a guess, there is a wealth of knowledge contained in this little zine. In fact, I defy you not to find something you love on this website. Happy shopping!

Another Hank purchase

I knew this gorgeous bag reminded me of something when I saw it in the Made by Hank shop...

The view just around the corner from our house as I drive towards the motorway! It's hard to get the full effect here, but with all the bunches of greenery on the landscape I always think of the tough ruffles on my Made By Hank bag.

With all the rain we've had recently, it's looking extra lush and gorgeous, don't you think?

I almost can't believe those blue skies are real, given the bad weather we've had recently (Force 8 gales nearly destroyed our roof!) but I assure you, I really don't have the photoshop skills :)

If the baby ever naps today...

... I will do a giveaway right here! Clue: it's something to do with the fact that Haunt is having a summer sale this weekend...

Treating myself

picture by Lu Summers of Summersville

I decided it was time to behave more like an adult and less like a student so I treated myself to a wonderful matching set of mugs from Summersville. If you'd like to upgrade your mug cupboard, visit the Summersville Etsy Shop to buy a Bloomsbury mug or six!

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!

Butcher Boy's Christmas Fayre

Are you in Glasgow and free on Saturday 11 December? Beat the usual festive rush at the shops AND get to see one of Glasgow's finest acts at the gorgeous surroundings of the Mitchell Library.

My friend (and former DJing partner in crime, fact fans) Alison has organised this event showcasing her band at the Mitchell in a couple of weeks. I'm going to try and make it over there, snowfall permitting, and the full details are as follows, below.



Time Saturday, December 11 · 11:00am - 4:00pm

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Location The Mitchell Library
North Street
Glasgow, United Kingdom

Join us in the beautiful Jeffrey Hall (top floor) for arts and crafts, home baking, face painting, raffles, and music from Butcher Boy and the Power Cut Choir.

The Fayre runs from 11am til 3pm.

Butcher Boy will play from 3pm til 4pm.

Entry is £1 for the Fayre only or £5 for the Fayre including the gig. Under-10s get in free!

All proceeds will go to the Beatson Institute and the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice.