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?

]]> http://www.askingfortrouble.org/crafts/2011/08/16/souvenirs/feed/ 1 http://www.askingfortrouble.org/crafts/2011/03/09/good-advice/ http://www.askingfortrouble.org/crafts/2011/03/09/good-advice/#comments Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:00:26 +0000 Marceline http://www.askingfortrouble.org/crafts/?p=2760

When I was going through my bookmarks for my monthly update, I realised I had bookmarked a whole load of great advice, so here it all is together. Inspiring stuff!

- Melody Miller posting about the long road to success is so spot-on – people really have an idea that success happens overnight. It DOES of course, but usually to people who have put in years of work in preparation.

- Lara Cameron on the self-perpetuating myth of successful creative business owner with perfect life, family and home (she forgot the red shoes). High five! More honesty from creative bloggers please. We’re all human.

- Crafting an MBA on how products are never ‘finished’ and you need to give up perfection and get on with it. “You can’t profit from ideas. You profit from execution”. Damn straight.

- Lizzy House at WhipUp – great tips on creating your own niche in a saturated industry (fabric design), but these tips are universal.

- George Monbiot’s career advice. Amazing advice – these are words to live by. If you want a job doing something then start doing it instead of waiting for your dream opportunity to arrive. It seems so obvious but so few people are willing to make the leap. This is also universal and what I started doing a while back – want to be a fabric designer? Make a collection on Spoonflower. Want to design more fun websites? Redesign your website in a hyper-kawaii style = no more enquiries about boring sites. Once you’ve proved you can do something, people will want more and be willing to pay you for it. Plus, for creatives, the best bit of doing it for yourself is you get to keep all the profits for yourself!

(And the Nice Advice postcards are by hellojenuine. I have the do something excellent one on my wall)

I promised ages ago I would share my original spooky wooky doodles so here you are! This is a page from a notebook I had with me when I went to Oban for my dad’s birthday last Summer. We spent a fair amount of time on ferries and much smaller boats so I imagine my train of thought was boats >  ships in bottles > pirates > ghost ships > mad scientist. Obviously.

Also Zelda of course, which has entire sidequests involving capturing things in bottles. I have never really gotten over the moment when the Wind Waker game made us realise that capturing fairies in bottles wasn’t fun for them. Sadface!

Here are photos of some of the zines made at the Zine Workshop. They were all amazing. Above is Jen‘s which she made on the train to Glasgow!

Bronwen made her first ever zine, on the subject of things she is unable to throw away. I think this has the makings of a full length zine :)

Neil made a super cute comic zine about things to do if you’re a ghost.

Aurora was the only one to use kraft paper and made an awesome zine of gestures. I think we all learned a lot from this one!

And Emma made two zines! All about the things she loves about Japan.

I also loved this zine which was made for her daughter who really wants a dog. Sorry, I forgot your name! Great use of all the materials.

This one is by Douglas. Not everyone managed to finish their zines but I think everyone was inspired to continue zinemaking. We used the 8 page booklet fold to keep things simple. There’s a video here which I think shows how to do it.

Lots more photos of these zines and others over at Flickr. If you’d like to make a zine then don’t forget to sign up for the Zine Challenge, and there are still some free zines left – see my previous post for details.

Oh, and I didn’t make a zine. After doing nothing but make, think and talk zines for the previous 5 days I was all zined out! Got lots of plans for new zines though.

Ha! How much fun am I having with Hipstamatic? This neat little app lets you turn your iPhone camera into one of those old-skool wide format vintage cameras. You even get a selection of lenses, films and flashes to get that perfect arty scratched up photo to show off to your hipster friends. You can also buy add-on packs if the default lenses don’t quite do it for you.

I love this app partly because it does take awesome photos but probably also because this must be killing those elitist photographers who think anyone with a digital camera should be shot. Mwahaha. Expect lots of these to crop up on my Flickr.