Craft Fayres, Committees and the Dragon Boat Festival

Where I work, many people have hobbies and are very crafty! A long while back my very dear colleague Caroline suggested that some of us run a craft fayre at the Dragon Boat festival that was going to be run (and is every year) by the Portsmouth Rotarians. Well it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss, so a bunch of us set up a committee which we called the 'craft committee' and started meeting on random Sunday mornings to have a coffee and come up with ideas etc. This was the first time I had ever been involed with a 'committee' and it was nowhere near as dreadful as I expected, in fact it was quite fun.
Slowly it all came together, and the weekend, although not exactly a Summer's weekend, fuelled some funds to go towards the charities.

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Blogging

Blogging? well what do you write about? I know for myself I find it quite difficult sometimes to come up with new things to put down, however, I decided that I would try and go through A to Z as the title, and that might give me some inspiration. Problem is what? Blogs? Beading? Blatant Copying? Beating the system? Bloody website?

So, todays will be about blogging, because I have been trying out both word press and blogger and come to the conclusion that I prefer blogger. However further than that, I also decided that for my website it would look better to have a blog that was directly linked to the web rather than a link coming over here. I read somewhere it was better and have to agree. So now any new things that happen on my site, new products, new services etc gets put on my news feed blog directly linked. So this is independent really, which means I can just whinge, moan or generally gossip -sounds like my kind of place ;-)

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Always on the lookout

As a jewellery designer - maker - fiddler, you find that you never rest. There is always an idea hovering somewhere in the back of your mind, and usually the absolute best idea pops up when you just cannot do anything about it. I used to try and carry a little note book round with me, but even then I couldn;t always take it out when I needed to.
Even worse, running a little business, you always have ideas that you can go with, new business cards, flyers, show idea,s something extra to put on the web, all of these things come just when you are in the middle of a meeting or an important conversation or telephone call.
Or is it just me?
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Generic Etsy

Was just thinking about the top sellers on Etsy, and something that strikes me is that although etsy promotes itself to be hand made site (what ever that means nowadays, with all the resellers and collectives nonsense going on), the best selling items are generally really quite generic. If you have a look in peoples shops, very often there tends to be a best seller or two (I'm talking about the better sellers not just the few items sold people.) and they are very often not one of a kind things, they are standards, just they have been made by hand by one person (hopefully) so are 'unique' in that way, but not really extra ordinary.
And when you start scrolling through the pages, you just keep coming across a pretty 'samey' feel all the way through. Is this just my imagination or has anyone else noticed this.


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Inspired from Africa

For many years I adored and collected Tuareg jewellery.  The skill of those craftsmen is amazing.  I have been wanting to try out something a little similar for ages but never have the time, this weekend however, I got a spare hour and this is it.  I'm happy with it, no where near as intricate as the gorgeous stuff from the Berbers or Tuaregs but I wanted it have a slant not to actually copy so I'm happy.

New Paper Stuff

Just updated my wrapping paper, so it is more in keeping with my logo and added some greetings cards to go with the wrapping.