It’s a point of honour that however busy I am, I still make my own personal Christmas cards. This year, I thought I was well organised, having found a stack of Angel Bunny Christmas tree photos while tidying up. It was only after making ten that I realised that was all there was and the rest were photos I’d used before. So I sent those to my biggest Angel Bunny fans and got on with Plan B.

I’m really pleased with Plan B – I cut out cookie ornaments from the postcards and hung them from a cut in the top of the card. Cute card and you have an ornament to keep too.

Even better, you can remove it now and there’s another little gingerbread man underneath. I just printed those on my inkjet printer.

I think I might have to make some more of these next year for the shop. What do you think?

I saw this tiny (real!) Christmas tree in M&S and had to buy it since a) I am tiny and b) I only like Christmas a tiny amount. It was pretty cute already but I thought I should add a few tiny decorations.

I thought I would probably have enough phone charms to use, but most of them were too big or had long loops. I had to keep the little orange guy though as it’s too cute. I clipped a bunny brooch on the top of the tree, that I made previously from felt easter decorations.

The rest are made from stickers! The square ones are by Moo (from my gift wrap sets) and the others are from my collection. I just found two the same and stuck them together with a loop of thread in between. The paper doves look particularly nice.

I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. If I can keep it alive I can change the decorations after Christmas – I’m thinking some pompom ribbon would be cute.

The pocket ghosts are all packaged up so it’s time to find out where they’re going. I very much enjoyed looking at all the cute ghosts you posted, but here are my favourite three, in no particular order.

Awww! This sad little ghost is available from Ji Ji Kiki, and was suggested by Azed.

This adorable Halloween bento was made by mymealbox and was suggested by jojoebi.

And finally, some amazing Rilakkuma papercraft toys posted by Paperkraft.net and suggested by Yoshi. If you like those, you should check out this years’ Halloween Rilakkuma toys – blub!

Congratulations to all the winners! Check your inboxes for my email and send me your addresses so I can post off your ghosts. Wooo! (by the way, I don’t know which ghost is in which package so it’ll be a surprise for you!)

Thanks everyone else for entering – we’ll do it again sometime.

It’s always exciting when I spot a new country in my order emails – this week I sent my first package to Algeria! I started making a Google map of all my order destinations and it’s pretty cool seeing them all together. That’s just September’s orders up there but I plan to go back and add them all in eventually – doing all my postage online means it’s pretty quick to do.

I got the idea from Nikki McWilliams, who also made this ace pinboard. I wonder if there’s a non-damaging way you could mark them on a globe – that would be awesome and really let you feel like dictator of the world.

Anyway, I’ll make the map public when I’ve added more so you can have a look. And don’t worry if you’ve bought from me in the past – I’m only marking each town/city, not your actual houses!

I’ve been super-busy (again) lately, mostly working on freelance web stuff to save up some money so I’ve got nothing to show you. Instead you can enjoy this quilt by Silvia who won my fabric giveaway earlier this year. You can see she used quite a lot of my dotty colour guide fabric. Read more about it on her blog.

I’ve also been working on some new zine stuff.  I’ve Zine You was pretty good fun – the rain kept people away but it was pretty busy in the afternoon. I’d tell you more, but I’ll be writing about that for another project you’ll hopefully get to see by the end of the year. I’ll be back with my monthly update and some actual news very soon.

As previously mentioned, Rothesay is not exactly a top shopping destination. While it initially appeared to have a variety of different stores, it turned out that they all basically sold tat of the pound shop variety. Victorian jewellery (and tat), Newsagent (and tat), Clothes shop (and tat). It’s quite possible that every month a man in a giant boat full of tat turns up and takes orders. I think the only shop not selling tat was the one selling an enormous range of lightbulbs and nothing else.

We did spot some rather fantastic illustrated postcards, which I promptly sent to all my family. I kept one of the Waverley for myself. I love how they’re both simplistic and really detailed. The artist is Nicola Jones but she doesn’t seem to have a working website.

You can imagine my delight when we discovered a haul of related goods inside the newsagents – there were fridge magnets, notepads, mugs and lots more all with over saturated views of Bute. I snapped up this colour-in calendar and I cannot wait until 2012 to start using it. I foresee a new section in my monthly updates.

I’m quite tempted to make one myself, using my own illustrations. Downloadable PDF series for next year?