Handmade Gifts that should have been at The Handmade Show.

 This weekend I should have been exhibiting at The Handmade Show in Perth Concert Hall. This is a real highlight of my events calendar and I have exhibited there every year since it started in 2011. As with all events this year, it has been cancelled due to the Coronavirus Pandemic. 

However! My online SHOP is well stocked with all the things I would have been bringing with me to the show!

This time last year I started making my Felt Bookmarks again and they have been very popular since. I'm always making new batches and each batch is slightly different. I have plenty of these three designs available at the moment.

Felt Bookmarks £12.95

I finished these two Keepsake Boxes this week. The felt for the lids feature gorgeous rustic hand dyed fibres and the sides are made with genuine Harris Tweed.

Keepsake Handmade Box £48

10x10x6 cm

Lots of Sheep Earrings, Brooches and Shawl Pins have been flying out the door but I do my best to keep the Sheep Jewellery Section of my shop topped up and I am usually able to make to order if your favourite colourway is not in stock.

Felt Sheep Earrings £19.95

Felt Sheep Brooch £22.95

Sheep Shawl Pin £19.95

If you are in Fife or Perthshire looking for independent shops to support, the following beautiful shops stock my iridescent jewellery and tweed brooches,

Silver Linings Design Studio, 13 High St, Perth

The Atholl Gallery, Dunkeld

The Rowan Tree Gift Shop, Falkland.

I also have some new pieces in my Etsy shop this week.

Iridescent Textile and Resin Earrings £19.95

Pendants £26

Harris Tweed and Felt Brooch Shawl Pins

£15

My 2021 Wall Calendar has been really well received. I still have some available.

2021 Calendar £12.75 

I had a new delivery of printed lens cloths and tins this week. These make great little presents.

Lens/Screen Cloths and Tins £4.95

So all this and more is available HERE. 

The easiest way is to browse is by shop section. 

All UK orders are being sent First Class and all International Orders are being sent Tracked. You can also order things to be sent straight to the recipient with a message from you at no extra cost. 

Thank you for visiting my website and I hope we can meet at some events before too long!

♥

Autumn Fairs in Fife and Perthshire

I had a brilliant start to my Autumn events season on the first weekend in October. It was lovely to be back in Falkland on the Saturday and Perth Festival of Yarn on the Sunday was a great success! It was heartening to know that many visitors came because they had seen the events advertised online so here is an update about more to come.

I will be at the Pitcairngreen Green Village Hall Annual Fair on Saturday 22nd October, 10 - 3.30pm.

 This is a lovely event with tea, coffee and home baking as well as a good variety of stalls. I have been exhibiting at this fair for over 10 years and it's always nice to go back and see familiar faces.

I've been busy restocking my Etsy shop as well with new makes.

Brooches £12

Next up after Pitcairngreen is Falkland Craft Market again on Saturday 5th November.

I will have my full range of items with me and hopefully some new framed pictures as well.

Sheep Earrings £18

Sheep Brooches £18

Sheep Pendants £24

My 7 x 7 x 7 cm Boxes are very popular so I have been making more of them. Made with my own felt and lovely Harris Tweed, this size is £35.

Later in November on Sunday 20th, I will be at The Handmade Show in Perth Concert Hall.

This year's show is shaping up to be excellent with new makers exhibiting along side some firm favourites.

My new coasters have been a big hit both online and offline. I got little boxes for them making them an ideal gift, especially easy to post!

Coasters £14.95

Later in November I'll be In The Loft at Ardross Farm Shop near Elie on Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th 9 - 5 each day. This is a lovely two day event, up above the farm shop and well worth a visit if you are in the East Neuk that weekend.

So it's a busy time keeping up with everything. 

Please feel free to get in touch with any questions you may have about my work or any of the upcoming events.

aileenclarkecrafts@yahoo.com

Edinburgh Yarn Festival 14th and 15th March 2015

You can find me at Edinburgh Yarn Festival on Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th March

Edinburgh Corn Exchange

10 Newmarket Road

Edinburgh

EH14 1RJ

10 - 5.30 pm Saturday

10 - 5 pm Sunday

I will have my full range of felt goodies with me including some new Trinket Boxes and Landscapes.

Maybe see you there!

Needle Felting Birds, Dolphins, Seascapes and Sheep

It has been a reasonably productive first week back in the work space and I have been enjoying playing around with a few new ideas.

In my last post I showed some step by step photos of how it's possible to use Transfer Paints and Pens to put an image onto fabric which can then be needle felted into.

The Transfer Pen is great for this as it leaves a clean black line that can be 'coloured in' with fibres. I used this method to transfer this bird motif onto some handmade felt. I got the motif from a book and enlarged it slightly then worked merino fibres into the design using a single needle felting needle.

It has been difficult to get decent photos this week with the dull winter light but hopefully you can get the idea.

I will probably frame the original piece and have bookmarks made using prints of it.

I used the same technique to make this dolphin.

The background is all dry felted using hand needle felting and the embellisher machine. A little bit of machine stitch adds detail. The dolphin is all needle felted by hand with a bead for his eye.

Dolphin £65

Sold

I love this piece below (am I allowed to say that I love my own work?) Well I do love this piece as it includes all my favourite colours and I really enjoy getting lots of texture into pieces like this using the embellisher machine.

The beauty of the machine is that you are not restricted to using fibres only. I have included all sorts in this piece including an old devore velvet blouse and a cheese cloth shirt. Some vintage lace makes nice frothy waves too. I'm planning a series of pieces in this style including various framed pieces, boxes, prints and cards.

I did have to tear myself away from my 'play time' to restock my Etsy shop with some Sheep Jewellery.

These brooches are now available and I plan to add more earrings and pendants next week as well.

See the Sheep Jewellery Section of my Shop here to see what is available.

Brooches £18

Earrings £18

In other news I bought my first Smart Phone along with a Chip and Pin Card Reader last weekend so that I can take Card Payments at Craft Fairs and Events.

It has been fun getting to grips with a fancy phone (thank goodness for a teenage son!)

I took this photo with it the other morning walking back along our track. I find the interconnectedness of it all via the wifi at home a bit mind blowing. I'm so used to just using my laptop for all my online business and it's interesting to see how my blog, Facebook page and shop look on a phone. It's amazing really how much technology has come on in the past few years and how quickly we have all embraced it and take it for granted already.

I'm still at the stage of enjoying all the wee noises my phone makes when I get notifications from all the apps. I'm sure the novelty of that will wear off quite soon but did you know that the Etsy Apps goes 

Cha-Ching! when someone makes a purchase? How cool is that! It sounds like an old fashioned shop till/cash register. I love that. 

❤

Rainbow Cake and A Few New Things

It has been an incredibly busy month here and seems to have just flown by in a blurry,  flurry of snow and creativity.

First of all I must share this amazing cake with you all. Well actually, I can't share it because we ate it all! But my friend Isabel made it for me using one of my felt pictures as inspiration. The icing was enough to be oooing and aahing over but imagine our surprise when we cut into it!

A rainbow cake inside! Tasted absolutely delicious too!

Who needs an occasion to eat cake? Not us :)

Hot off the work table are these new pendants and earrings.

These heart shaped pendants are smaller than my usual ones and come on a 16 inch silver plated snake chain.

The matching earrings are hung on locally handmade, solid silver ear wires in a variety of styles. 

I will have all these new pieces with me at Falkland Craft Market next Saturday, 6th April.

Also available in felt.

More new earrings include these cute little circular ones.

Very versatile and easy to wear.

I've also been busy making a batch of Sheep earrings, pendants and brooches.

 I have lots of printed cards in stock and I'm really looking forward to seeing them all displayed together at the fair. 

I will have my range of notebooks and sketchbooks with me also and hope to have a few pictures and trinket boxes made in time as well.

However, it can't be all work and no play this week as it is the holidays and I got this book out of the library for my daughter and I to make a few things from. It's a really great book and most of the projects can be made with things we already have around the house. We just need to invest in some new poster paints in pretty colours and we'll be happily crafting away these cold days.

 As always, a variety of my work is available to buy online here

Calendar Update and Sheep Brooches

Here we are more than half way through November and there are only 15 of my 2013 Calendars left!

I'm not planning on ordering any more so I thought I'd better let you all know in case you had wanted one.

The notebooks are flying out the door too with one design sold out already. There are less than 10 Highland Cow ones in stock but plenty Seascape and Cottage (I ordered more of them to start with, should have got more coo's!)

Calendars are £9.95

Notebooks £5.95

and can be found here

 I have spent the last week catching up on a few things and photographing as much as possible to list online.

All these and more are available on Etsy now.

I have been asked a lot over the past few weeks if I will be making any more sheep brooches and the good news is that yes I will!
The brooch trays have arrived and there are now a few available in my Etsy shop.

If you would like to order one just email me at aileenclarkecrafts@yahoo.com

UPDATE! Due to demand, more Calendars and Notebooks have been ordered!



Bonnie Wee Hooses

 I think it's fair to say and obvious through my work that I have a bit of a thing for wee cottages.

I was brought up living in a cottage on the outskirts of Perth and I've lived in a few different ones over the years including the one I live in now with my husband and two children. 

This is the cottage I grew up in as a teenager. My brother lives in it now.

Painting By Jim Douglas

This is the cottage we live in now.

You can just about make it out behind the trees! The trees provide a nice bit of shelter and are home to lots of Greenfinch in the summer. Thankfully they are all still standing after yesterday's gale force winds! I felt like I was in the opening scenes of a disaster movie yesterday when I went out for wood and coal!

 I found these old photos taken in 1996 on a visit to Donegal with my Mum. I can remember we were ridiculously over excited with these cottages much to the bemusement of the old fella we met in the driveway.

 We were even more over excited when we saw that this one was a florists!

Mum and I both worked as florists for years and we thought this our absolute dream place.

A few weeks ago I spotted a photo on Craft Blog UK that really intrigued me.

It was of a knitted cottage against the backdrop of the beautiful Scottish Highlands. I immediately went in search of it's maker and got chatting via email to Julia Marsh, owner of Hand Knitted Things based in the north west of Scotland. 

Julia sells knitting patterns for her little croft house cottages but seeing as knitting is not one of my talents she offered to knit one for me!

 Drum roll please.............

Ta da!!!

 I am so delighted with it! I think it's the cutest thing ever.

It reminds me of some of the wee hooses we saw on holiday this summer out on Harris.

And of course it's like a 3D version of one of my own little needle felted ones.

Sunset Behind The Croft

£40

You can find out more about Julia and her Hand Knitted Things here

So we had an unusually wild and windy day here yesterday with the children off school and the fire needing fed like a hungry animal.

My postie still got through though and brought me some new supplies to play with.

 These new Felt Flower Pendants are now available in both my Etsy and Folksy shops priced £20.

More colours coming soon.


I also have these new Sheep Earrings available in both my shops. Just click the images to go to the listings.