Come ON spring...

                                   

This winter seems to be dragging on forever. Motivation and energy have been seriously lacking. The first couple of months of a  new year always feel like a bit of a false start to me.  Christmas is over, the decorations packed away and you're ready for the new year, a new start, new ideas...yay! Then you realise it's still rather cold and dull and dreary and dark, but there is no festive season with it's cheery celebrations to enjoy and chase away the gloom.... Suddenly spring feels like a long way off and the temptation to hibernate  with mugs of hot tea and wedges of chocolate cake takes hold. That said, the first snowdrops are appearing in the garden, and the days are slowly getting longer...so there is hope on the horizon & spring flowers (nearly) in bloom.

Once again this year I have succumbed to moaning and shuffling my way through January, not really getting much done, but I'm determined not to waste February as well. Therefore, in an attempt to focus the mind, I thought a new post featuring some of my latest handcrafted 'makes' might be a good place to start:

First up a gift for a good friend. Another of my zipped pouches, but in a fabric chosen specifically for the Birthday Girl. 

The feature fabric is by textile designer Kate Spain for Moda & as soon as I saw it and it's  peacock feathers-inspired lovliness, I knew it was perfect!

The young daughters of 2 sets of close family friends also celebrated birthdays just recently. It does get difficult to buy gifts when you know they are going to get loads of presents...and we've only just had Christmas. So I decided to make them both name-banner flags to hang in their bedroom/across the end of the bed/along a shelf/on the door/over a window.......

As with many of my gifts for children, I wanted to use fabrics that would last the girls for some years to come and not feel too 'baby-ish'. Hopefully, these flags will do the job!

A new little product I wanted to get going on this year was doorstops. A friend of mine had requested one in the same style as one I already have propping open our kitchen door. It wasn't something I had made, so the challenge was on to make one the same....a bit of tinkering later...and da dah! I didn't just make one however,....I made LOTS:

These make a great gift for yourself or someone else, with fabrics chosen to co-ordinate with the rest of a room. Fab for a child's bedrooms too...to prop that door open at night-time and keep the scary dark at bay!!

So there we have it...proof that I have done SOMETHING in the first few weeks of this year! Next up are another couple of orders for toy bags and then I'm planning on utilising some of my ever-expanding stock of designer fabrics to create some products to (hopefully) sell on my 'yet-to-be-set-up-but-always-on-my-to-do-list' Folksy site.  That's the plan anyway...let's hope for no more snow, or I'll be back moaning about the weather with that hot cup of tea and chocolate cake, achieving very little, other than an greatly increased waistline!