Necessity is the Mother....

A little more on the idea of lovely creative spaces today. I set about tidying up my loft after a couple of weeks' intensive making and was reminded of a tale my husband told me about a school friend of his who once took two hours to clear up his Lego. Rather than place the bricks straight into the box he had painstakingly built a digger with which to shovel the bricks away!

I always thought that this was fairly typical of the person in question who is known for eccentricity, however, I had a similar moment when tidying up my desk yesterday and it dawned on me with some shame that I do this quite often! I too tidy up by making things and in hindsight always have done. When I was a child I would often dismantle cardboard boxes and remake them in different sizes to fit into specific places, I'd also used yards of sellotape trying to create divisions in things so that I could 'organise' stuff. I have used bricks and planks to make bookshelves in my bedroom and converted things into other things so often that I forget what they were in the first place!

Having a space in my house that is all my own as an adult is giving me so much scope to indulge this side of me that I am suprising myself with what I can come up with now I can use a drill! I have had these cheap drawers for ages (I think they were from Focus or B&Q etc) and gradually each drawer has become redundant as I have developed habits of keeping its contents elsewhere.

Previously I had stamped the title of the contents of each drawer on in ink but they have now been changed so often there is just a smudge on each. I had the brainwave of turning the drawers around and using a drawer pull instead of the semicircular cutout there is at the moment. I resisted the temptation to buy knobs on ebay and rooted out some utilarian buttons instead - suspender buttons etc. A quick rub with some danish oil and a few labels and this is the result! I am going to use them to organise my work into our various shops and stockists - when a drawer is empty, make more stuff.

It is prettier than a lego digger I think!

Paula xxx

Saltaire Arts Trail

This weekend Wychbury took part in the fantastic Makers' Fair, part of the Saltaire Arts Trail which takes place during the two week Saltaire Festival. Saltaire is near to where I live in West Yorkshire and is famous for being a model village built by Sir Titus Salt and for housing David Hockney's work in the fabulous Salts Mill

This is our forth year at the Makers Fair and the event gets better and better. As well as making lots of sales, we meet loads of fantastic people - makers and customers and get lots of new opportunities opened up for us in terms of other events, new shops etc. Please visit the artists and makers page on the Arts Trail website as there are just too many lovely people to mention! Congrats to everyone involved on a fantastically successful weekend.

Paula xxx

My Pocket Sewing Box

I love this and felt the need to share! I found it on our local car boot sale last year for the standard 50p and didn't realise that it had sections in it until I got it home. I have no idea how old it is but I'm imagining it was a trinket box in its day, I now use it to carry all my tiny bits of hand-sewing in that I can work on away from the house. I sew at toddler groups, outside school, on the bus/train, in the park, cafes, on the stall at craft fairs - anywhere! This is way more atractive than the plastic bag I used to use and my needles don't poke through it!

Paula x