Lush Designs

If you are looking for colourful and quirkily designed home wares, I wholeheartedly recommend taking a browse through the delightful products by Lush Designs. Their screen printed lampshades are one of my favourite things to ogle at when I am in need of healthy dose of pretty things. Naturally I was drawn to the fox design, but after some thought I decided that I preferred it in the cream and pale grey to darker tones because of how the colours of a lampshade can affect the light in the room. The colours of all the designs are so beautiful and well combined that they seem to make my mouth water. The cotton napkins adorned with root vegetable screen prints are a prime example, with their exquisite array of purples, oranges and blues!

Craft Fair Preparations

It is with great excitement that I inform the lovely readers of this blog, and the wonderful fans of Mystic Moose, that the time has come for our first craft fair! If you are in the Cotswolds on Saturday 11^th August, then pop along to Gloucester Folk Museum for the MADEmarket, an exciting new series of craft fairs in the local area!

I am a great advocator of buying beautiful handcrafted delights and vintage trinkets whilst browsing stalls at craft fairs, but I have never been a seller at one of these events. The thought had always seemed a little daunting, mainly because of the amount of stock I would need to make in preparation. I usually keep about ten of each item and design in my stock cupboard and make more when they sell, but for a craft stall, particularly with the smaller and less expensive items, I would need much more than this or the stall would look rather empty. Having read many articles on the matter, it seemed it was far better to overestimate and arrive laden with too much stuff, and hide it under the table ready to replenish the displays, than to bring the right amount of stock and have a stall that is half empty!

Having thoroughly raided my belongings for all interesting boxes, containers and knickknacks, I have begun to sort the ones that may be of some use. A small set of shelves lying flat on its back can hold a variety of pencil cases, a wine box tipped on its side becomes both a shelf for a cotton tote bag and a display box, an empty tea chest given to me last Christmas becomes a handy container for pocket mirrors and badges.

My only problem is all of these items are made from different coloured wood and materials, and when placed together, despite making an interesting, efficient and varied display, they look inconsistent. I’ve resigned to painting them all matt white (bar a few lovely old items made from wood), with the hopes of bringing attention to the products they hold. I know from experience that having different materials to create levels or backdrops can be distracting if they lack a consistent style or colour scheme. I remember stalls I have seen that unitised wicker boxes, antique wooden wine crates, painted white benches, plywood card stands and chequered fabric covered blocks, which all looked lovely individually, but they lacked cohesion when arranged together on a stall. I guess such details are not really noticeable to the average craft-browser, who may not think twice about the design and would hopefully be gazing longingly at a beautifully handmade craft item, it is something I have noticed whilst scrutinising fairs for ideas and inspiration for my stall.

Ultimately, I guess much of the display is dependent on personal taste, alongside the style of your brand. The best stalls I have seen have used backdrops made of one or two materials, such as the aged wooden crates and some white washed furniture items. Such stalls lured me in, especially if they had smaller items that enticed me to peer closer. Whilst rummaging for display boxes, I found an old fold-up table which, with the legs removed, became a lovely screen backdrop for part of the stall, which can also be used to hang some smaller items from.

For the last month or so I have had several product lines that I wanted to make but never found the time. The craft fair is a perfect opportunity to make some of these smaller items and get a feel for how popular they are and whether it is worth making more. If all goes to plan, the below items should be available to sale online by the end of next week!

On the top of my new products list is our lovely new badges. There are two kinds – large button badges, made using my badge and mirror making machine, and the shaped ones made from exciting shrink plastic! I am very happy with these shrink wrap badges, although they can be time consuming to cut out, bake and varnish.

I also have been making lavender bags, which have filled my studio with a delicious scent. They are filled with French lavender, with a heat pressed image on the front and a twine tag for hanging in wardrobes. I have been hesitant to make them because I was uncertain about whether I could export lavender to the USA and Canada, so when I start selling them online, I will only be shipping these within the UK and Europe for the time being.

And not forgetting Make-up bags, filled with wadding to protect their contents! I planned to launch these when I started to making pencil cases, but they spent longer in the development stage than I initially thought, whilst I found the right material to use as padding. (No photos for these as yet, but expect many more to come after the stall!)

This craft fair, alongside spending many hours developing exciting new crafty products for my shop, is part of my excuse for my lack in internet presence over the last month. Blog posts I have intended to write haven’t had the time to manifest, or are waiting to evolve from hastily scribbled blurbs in sketchbooks whilst travelling on public transport. With less than a week to go, I still have many more pencil cases to sew, mirrors and badges to press, and a little bit of painting to do, but all is going exceptionally well!

The MADE market is at Gloucester Folk Museum on Saturday 11^th August 2012.

Mapping Lampshades

Covering lampshades in paper is considerably easier than covering them in fabric, although the same cautions apply regarding wrinkling in the glue. This particular lampshade has evaded being smothered in floral fabric for many months, each attempt being foiled by a tragic case of such crinkliness. I think it’s something to do with the shape; I just couldn’t get the fabric tight enough.

The map was part of the old atlas I found last week, and, after overcoming my guilt about cutting up the pages and reassuring myself that it would create something even more beautiful, two pages were used to cover the shade using pretty much the same technique as last time.

Carboot Treasures

My carboot find of the week was a TV security system, consisting of a mini monitor and a wireless video camera. Unsure if it was in working order, I haggled down to £4; sure enough, for the first hour of its new life, it displayed static fuzz with an occasional flicker from the camera. I felt a wash of relief when the image cleared up, filling the small screen with a worried picture of my own face as I prodded at the buttons. From then on it has worked fine, and I assumed it had gotten caught in the rain and needed to dry out a little. During the tentative time when it was unclear whether it worked or not, I looked online to see if there was a manual available, and discovered when bought new, these systems came with two cameras so the monitor can be switched to either channel. I immediately began to conjure up fox-related artworks which involved giving the viewer the choice of which live channel/video camera to watch.

I also retrieved an old atlas from a box of disintegrating books. It is bound by rusty stables, the front and back covers being long been torn off, which makes it difficult to tell how old it is, but I’ve managed to conclude that it must have been printed sometime between 1914 and 1921. The adverts for other educational books at the back (which are priced in shillings and pence) state that they were revised in 1914. Large portions of the map are described as being part of the ‘British Empire’, but I say 1922 because it also indicates that Ireland is also governed by the British government, and was wasn’t until 1921/22 that Ireland was divided into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. The atlas smells dusty, like old newspapers that have been stored in attics, and there is a beautiful yellow tinge to the paper. It’s almost too beautiful to contemplate cutting up and creating envelopes and cards and covering lampshades and photo frames with, so I think I may scan some of the pages to use in future projects.

Fabric Covered Drawers

The week has been a productive one in terms of decorating home wares. Today hailed the completion of a bedside cabinet lovingly decorated with some fabric I bought in a charity shop last week. Vast amounts of PVA glue, some strenuous stretching of nylon-mix fabric, and several cups of chai tea later, and the result is a semi-revolting, bohemian-eque set of drawers, which will hopefully look considerably more attractive when situated amongst the rest of my belongings when I move home in the summer. I like to imagine them adorned with a cream metal picture frame and lamp complete with a floral shade, with bedtime reading piled in the alcove. My return to college is imminent, and so any hopes of varnishing my work will have to wait several months until the academic year is over.

Car Boot Frenzy

An amazing car boot sale haul today in terms of arty goodness. A few treasures include:

A loom – handmade and small, but perfect for little adventures into weaving. I could spend time making one, but felt £1 wasn’t much to part with.

Two little boxes with compartmental shelves – I plan to paint one white, and use them to store miniature things.

Blue polka dot cotton fabric.

Dylon die – A lovely woman who was selling packets for £1 each, instead of the usual £2.50 – £3, so I indulged myself with 5 packs of my regular colours.

The most amazing stall in the world. Not so much for the art materials, but for my own personal joy. A man selling what seemed to be end-of-line stuff from one of those shabby-chic shops. Everything was 50 pence or £1. I got some polka dot forks, Griselda Graham heart candle holders, and a metal heart shaped magnet board, which I will soon be covering with fabric.

More Attempts To Avoid Writing Research Papers

Yes, I am aware that I have a lot of work to do, but I find comfort in the fact that my procrastinating is at least a creative process. In any case, recovering a lampshade takes barely a few minutes when done carefully.

1. Ensure you have ample fabric laying it out flat and rolling the lampshade over it to measure.
2. Using a brush, cover the lampshade with an even coat of PVA glue.
3. Slowly and carefully roll the lampshade over the fabric, ensuring the fabric is pulled tightly around the edges to eliminate creases.
4. Fold the edge of the fabric over when you reach the beginning again, so that the sheared edge doesn’t show and it creates a seam.
5. Using a pair of pinking shears, cut the fabric at the top and the bottom of the shade so that only an inch remains.
6. Cut small snips into this edge fabric so that it will fold over the edge smoothly.
7. Go round the edges gluing the fabric down. Again, it is worth double folding it, so that the sheared edge doesn’t show, because depending on the thickness of the fabric, when the light shines through there will be a slight silhouette of this edge.

I find the process strangely addictive, and have come to the conclusion that no lampshade is safe from me: they shall all be smothered in a floral wonderland…

Recycling

I’ve been revamping an old mirror frame I found in my bedroom at home with ripped up White Stuff catalogues. I am particularly fond of the super dog in the bottom corner and the birds with capes at the top..