The market season is drawing to a close. Here in Melbourne it’s getting chilly and the leaves are changing colour to mark Autumn. I’ve only been doing markets for two seasons and recently I’ve been reflecting on the whole experience. I started it just as we were coming out of the pandemic lockdowns and I …
Decades ago I trained as a teacher. Before I’d had a chance to work out what I really wanted to do. Does anyone know what they want to do at 18, or what they’re good at? I did a pretty good job at pretending to be a primary school teacher for a while. But it …
You may have noticed that I got very enthusiastic about writing for the past couple of weeks. I had decided that I could put out three blog posts a week ongoingly. Why? Well, it seemed like a good idea of course. I do this a lot with all sorts of things. I can never manage …
My best-selling products at the markets are the collections of small doll ‘Sew Together’ kits. When I first designed and made them I honestly wasn’t sure how much people would like them. But I found that after a few weeks I needed to order more fabric. The ‘Little Bag of Friends’ are particularly popular, especially …
We need a mini-break! The first three months of this year have whipped by at break-neck speed. It’s just as busy as it was in pre-pandemic days. Perhaps we’re trying to keep on the treadmill to distract ourselves from the nightmare that is going on in the rest of the world. With horrific floods in …
It’s been a little over a month since I started selling at local markets. Packing up my car the night before with tables, gazebo, card stands, 20kilo weights in case of wind gusts and boxes and boxes of stock. Then leaving the house at 6am to travel to a field and set up shop with …
If you were to make a wish list for the best weather and people for your first market it would look a lot like this. 24 degrees, light breeze and clear blue skies. Friendly stallholders who buy you coffee before the start of the day – seriously, I’d never met this person before! (Tracey from …
Time to wrap up 2021 and wish it a fond farewell! But first a little bit of reflection. It hasn’t all been easy but I can look back on this year and safely say I enjoyed creating a bunch of stuff, I made some good progress and faced some really unexpected hurdles. I use a …
Mid November, panic time! Although generally I get the sense that Christmas has a different tone this year. Let’s face it, it’s very difficult to expect anything to arrive on time if you’re buying online. Stuff is hanging about in warehouses waiting to be delivered. Here in Australia there are huge delays in the postal …
Creating sewing kits Over the past couple of months I’ve been working on creating two collections of sewing kits. Now they’re finally ready to put in the shop! The idea came from watching my teenage kids getting into sewing during lockdown (and again in the next lockdown and the next. We’re in lock down 5 …
Face masks with wire! So life is opening up again and it feels weird and worrying so this weekend I hid behind my sewing machine. That’s not strictly true, we did have drinks with a few friends and of course I ferried the kids around but I did spend a large amount of time sewing …
Sew-Walk-Draw-Design-Repeat As for most people on planet earth at the moment life has changed dramatically around here during the past two weeks. But we’re lucky, we have space to walk the dogs and for each of us to hide away from each other when we need to. I’ve been enjoying starting some unusual projects. At …
