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Tuesday 29 July 2014

Vintage pieces...

Just a collection of beautiful pictures of items in my possession at the moment...

Gorgeous metal vintage shoe trees
Pretty vintage tobacco tin

Blue Bird toffee tin 






Thursday 24 July 2014

My day at the V & A...

On Tuesday 22 nd I was lucky enough to get a place via Pinterest UK ( http://www.pinterest.com/) at a wonderful craft afternoon held at the awesome venue that is the Victoria and Albert Museum in London at an event for The Handmade Fair (http://www.thehandmadefair.com/) doing paper crafts taught by the simply amazing Poppy Chancellor (http://poppychancellor.com/) please check out her website what she does with paper is amazing!!! She is a crafting wizard. The whole event was hosted by the simply divine Kirstie Allsopp who I had to tell how much I loved her. Yeah I played it massively cool (!) I mean that woman does many tv shows on crafts and Christmas plus vintage, which are all my loves and her cousin is Cath Kidston. I want to be her when I finally grow up, if I ever grow up.
I have never done any sort of paper crafting before, mainly because some one is getting hurt when I am trusted with a sharp object and by someone I mean me. Yeah I am that fool that will cut some hair off by accident or I will get blood every where by waving my scissors about. Shockingly this time I came out OK apart from the headache caused by concentrating so hard on not fluffing up in front of all these other amazing crafty peeps and awesome people. I mean how embarrassed would I have been to be bleed out in front of Craft Goddess Kirstie Allsopp?! I would have simply turned beetroot in colour and played down any accident even if my right hand was hanging off from the shame. Thankfully nothing like that happened even though there were 50 women in a room all with knives, ha ha. The afternoon was even more awesome as I got to meet up with Lizzie Sibley, Viktorija from andsmile and the lovely Lindsay from Wood, paper, scissors (https://www.facebook.com/woodpaperscissors.uk) who I met back in March with Etsy and Pinterest for a coffee morning.
We had a great couple of hours eating cake and carefully cutting and chatting, I so rarely get to make with anybody else, I am normally a silent and lone worker that it was actually a breath of fresh air to do it with other people, as well as the chat and to achieve so much. All the bunting will be used too decorate at the Handmade Fair later this summer so look out for my wonky pieces if you are going!

me carefully cutting and keeping my fingers away from the blade

two of my finished pieces of paper bunting, the circles were gits to do

The back of my head and Lindsay chatting with Kirstie
All the bunting we made!










Wednesday 9 July 2014

Buying (and keeping?) Vintage

So on the off chance I popped in to a charity shop the other day and saw the most incredible vintage wooden perpetual wall calendar!

Look!

clarashandmade
I love love love this calendar!
It has lived a working life. I adore it. Herein lies my dilemma. I had bought this to sell on in my Etsy shop but the more research I have done on it and in the process of cleaning it I have totally fallen in love. What do I do? Do I list it and sell it and hope that one day in the future I will come across another like it? Or do I keep it even though it doesn't completely suit my current decoration theme? But with a few small tweaks I could make it work out. My heart is telling me to keep it, my head is saying sell it! There are not many of these around and the others I have seen I have never even battered an eyelid at. But this one has captured my heart and is pulling hard at my heart strings. But my head is telling me: sell it! The cold business voice is shouting "you bought this to sell to make money to help to buy your new car!" My heart is squelling 'Keeeep it, Clara it's pretty.'
Sigh.
I am so conflicted. I am writing this before I have even taken any photos of it. (The above image was added afterwards.) The battle of head and heart when you buy vintage pieces is always this hard especially when like me you buy pieces that you could see yourself owning. I think I will list it in my Etsy shop and if it hasn't sold buy the time the first advert has expired then I will keep it as we were destined to be together. Right?

Take care
Love Clara x

Shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/clarashandmade
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClarasHandMade
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/clarashandmade