Personalised Stockings Special - 12 Months of Christmas Deals!

Customer pic of little Tomaso getting ready for Father Christmas!

We are launching our ridiculous but like-honest-guv'nor-for-reals
12 Months of Christmas Promotion!  To help us plan the Stockings better, and give you all a stonking good deal, we are offering silly prices on Stockings made throughout the year.

A personalised patchwork stocking is normally £36.50, but we are offering them starting at £25 in January!
Every month, the price will go up by £1 until normal pricing resumes in December.  This is a great way to get one for all the family - as one of our customers, Claire said "They are so beautiful, and I love that we will be getting them out year after year after year; they are a real investment."

We were hyper-super-majormongously busy with our lovely Christmas stocking orders in the weeks before Christmas - but we still had time for one of our favourite games - texting photo updates to the customers awaiting them.  Time to share - here's a montage of those pics, and the happy responses.  To order your stockings for £25, simply head over to the website now - but hurry - this is the all-time lowest price!

Life's Just Better With Jam

Of course, it's taken me so long, their feet no longer fit.  Ahem.

We discover, Dormouse Moneybags and me, that all of a sudden a half-term or an Easter or a Christmas holidays is slap bang sitting right on top of us.  Wham!  Just like that.  We're all, what the, how the, where the heck did the time go?  Are our children ever in school?

I like how it looks as if they've signed their feet...

And in those weeks of course there's little point trying to do anything involving the following high falutin' thinky activities - planning, strategy, website editing, product design, image editing.
You know, just the stuff in our jobs.  No way.  Forget it.  And certainly not making products for our lovely (we're curtsying right now, curtsying) customers, who deserve only the highest quality products we can muster.

Add one gorgeous bright red giant bathmat!

But we're addicted to sewing, so we do both attack little projects for our own home, since it doesn't remotely matter if we cock those up.  Yes, I like to make a right old scruffbag of a thing for my gaff.  I don't care about loose threads, scruffy edges, double-stitching, linings, neat hems, market trends, on-trend colourways or nuffink.  No, I just grab some scraps, cut 'em up, hoop up, throw a sausage at the kids, stitch something to something else, lob some squash at the kids, stitch some more bits to some other bits, cut, snip, stitch, say "Yeeees!" to whatever thing they've just asked for (crisps was it? Tequila? Tree-climbing? Fire-starting? No idea, just can't stop in the middle of machine-embroidery), stitch a bit more, pinking shear some edges, bob's your uncle and here's a bowl of ice-cream with chocolate sauce and yes, of course, help yourself to too much telly.

Enter me for Mother of the Year Award, you say?  Oh yes please, do, do.

Machine-embroidered scraps for a picnic blanket

Anyway, so here are the things I'd been meaning to make for donkeys' years, and scruffy though they are, I'm glad I've done them.  They are the very things I love - they inject creativity into the fabric of this house.  They are there to please no-one but me (and if they please other people, hooorah!); they are spontaneous; vintage; sustainable; re-used; and best of all, being used, so I get to have a little cock-eyed smile at them each time I see them.  Slightly smug.  You know that smile.
I must tell you that the bathmat idea is not mine, no - I saw it in passing at a nice blog once, and always meant to do it.  You can find a smashing tute for it here if you're not confident about tackling it freestyleeee....

The picnic blanket idea has been germinating for a while in my bonce.

 

These are all machine-embroidered squares with daft phrases on them, like our Piece & Jam Collection.  Ok, it's going to take me a while, but once I've done 12 or so, I'll throw them together with some other squares to make a picnic blanket - whack an old shower curtain on the back and hey presto, all ready for an English picnic, for which waterproofing is always advisable. A load of foody phrases, coz life is just better with Jam.

Whose voice can you hear now?  Yep.  That's right.  Homer Simpson.

Yes, that is Eddie Izzard, most beloved of this Isle.  There'll be a few more of his by the time this picnic has finished.  Cake or death?

So, now then - I'd like to know any of the following in your comments please...either here or on our Facebook page....

a) What did you make in the holidays, and on a scale of 1-10, how scruffy was it?
b) What were your most shameful hands-off childcare tactics?  Share.  Seriously - I need some tips!
c) More Eddie Izzard phrases for the picnic blanket please.  And by the way, these are for everyone - please make a picnic blanket using them!  Could you pass me the idioms please.  Thank you.

Eco Tip 1 - Party Bunting!

Oh boy have I been having fun with plastic bags! 

Ok, so that's not an auspicious start to any article, but hello there - what, more school holidays?  Yes, in the flash of an eye we seem to be upon another one.  So OriginalStitch has had to cast its creative net wider.  The Daughters just weren't up for uploading images of our up and coming Office Collection onto the website.  (They will have to soon.  'Bout time they started pulling their weight.)

But I can assure you we found a project that is good clean eco fun, with a healthy does of potential ironing injuries and possible asphyxiation via the means of toxic fumes.  Which I think we can all agree is an acceptable level of daily danger.  I mean, you think about it - what have you got in your workroom?  Pins....scissors....rotary cutters....one heck of selection of glues and adhesives and 14 tones of dangerously towering stashes of fabric.
So, all in all we're talking stabbings, prickings, amputations, toxic poisoning and squashings.
Never let it be said that craft is a gentle art.
Oi!  Health and Safety!  Got a live one here!  Well it IS half-term, so one needs to find child-appropriate activities, and they're just not fun unless they're a bit dangerous.  It was either this or climbing the apple tree, which is hugely fun, but we needed something to show for our efforts.  I like a result.

Um, anyhoo - so, inspired by this excellent tutorial here, which nearly made me hyperventilate with excitement (you can see from my comment on there how excited - it has made-up words in it and everything.  My level of excitement can almost always be measured by the number of neologisms contained therein) I decided to have a crack at making some party bunting, for a party we're having for me and The Husb's birthdays.  Sorry, The Husb's and my birthdays.  The Husb and mine birthdays.  Our birthdays.
Ok, I don't mean to criticise the language of Shakespeare but there are times when English just doesn't cut it.  How ARE you meant to phrase that??

As you can see we dug out a load of bits of spangly glittery loopiness, and we had an afternoon of fun making these.  The daughters got involved, and it was really quite an artistic endeavour.  You could get seriously arty farty with it because you layer up your plastics and then melt it all together and get some great results.  You could use different coloured plastic bags to make patterns or even pictures, including letters to make personalised bunting. What a great present that would be!  If I'd thought ahead could have done our names, but you know, hindsight and all that blah, so we'll go with whatever.

We used garden string for ours for a rustic look, and didn't need a needle because it's pretty prickly stuff anyway.  Worked perfectly.
When the girls were making theirs I gave them piles of ready-cut triangles and they combined them and stuck little bits of stuff in, ready to hand over the to their mother at the ironing board.  We hole-punched the finished flags and then I threaded them through, with a knot behind each hole so they can flip and flap in the wind, but basically not move around too much, or overlap.

This, for your information, is where the excellent Broadband will play - how fun is that?  They will sit 'neath spangly party bunting and play toons for us to dance to (yes, people, a barndance) and when I've had enough of the dancing, I shall take up me fiddle and get in there under the bunting and give the tunes a punt myself.

A perfect English summer garden party!  Bunting and fiddles. Whatever you use it for, I implore you - give this a go, it is SUCH fun.  Go, go - dig out those plastic bags!