Friday Focus

Following on from emails that I recieve asking me about my labels and where fellow crafters can find them, I thought I would start a new spot on my blog that focuses on different shops that I shops at or wish I could shop at!

So to start with I thought we would take a trip to the lovely JennifersJewels on Etsy, the fabulous shop that makes my bag labels by hand. 

When I started the business last year  I needed a small run of labels that carried my own design.  I looked around on the internet, but all of the mainline label businesses seemed so expensive and I had to order a huge run, which just wasn’t practical.  Then I discovered JennifersJewels on Etsy.

This shop allows you to choose a design from one of her many beautiful labels or you can send her your own design.  

Jennifer has put together a fabulous selecton of designs in different colour way that you can then add your business name to.

I love her pink range of designs!

The last set of labels designs are blank and allow you to choose a style which you can then put your own design on, which is what I have done to create the funky diva design labels:

This is my main label with the business name on.

I also chose labels with ‘fdd’ on for the outside of the bags to act as external name tags.

When I order new sets of labels I love waiting for my parcel to arrive from America!

Have fun shopping!

Adventures in Leather

No not the kinky kind of adventures in leather, the making kind of adventures in leather!

Last week a local business man left me a gift of leather off cuts from his upholstery business in town.  A lovely bag full of 16 different cuts of leather – doesn’t leather just smell so lovely?

Anyway, after a week of worrying about how to work with leather I finally took the plunge today and thought I would share the results of all my hard wok today (believe me it has been hard work trying to get it right!).

As you can see I have worked the leather into a base for the fabric bag.

The leather was very easy to sew to the fabric, though the curved corners were tricky.

Of course my FDD label has to go into the side seam!

And the bag is big enough to fit everything a girl could possibly need!

It has a zippered pocket and a open fabric pocket, as well as a swivel snap for keeping your keys safe!

I hope you like it!

It will be making an appearance in my Etsy shop as soon as I have measured it and I think I will be making many more!

House or a Home?

Around Christmas time I posted a blog about quilts and how they have an emotional significance attached to when you make them.  The quilt I am working on is my divorce quilt.  A bit strange I know but, it will always be a quilt of freedom from a troubled man. 

Since Christmas my life has been on one long roller coaster ride and the quilt has not been finished as I feel that it needs to be completed once everything has been resolved.  I don’t expect a full resolution, but just to settle into a calmer state would be nice!

One of the major things that has happened has involved our formal martial home.  This was a house we choose in the lovely town of Tetbury and was perfect for our family.  I loved the house and the location immediately.  It fitted us like a glove.  The house was nothing special, but it was our home that we had picked as a family.

2 weeks ago the courts ordered that the house be repossessed by the mortgage company. Fortunately I had moved us out of there last March because I simply could not pay the mortgage.  My ex-husband moved in and lived there until January, when he then decided to abandon it.

It has been a long waiting game to have the house repossessed and now it has finally happened I feel a sense of lose again for all the hopes and dreams I had whilst married.  It is the final thing holding us together financially and closes the last chapter on our marriage.  So in my usual way of dealing with things I have turned to sewing to help cope with the changes.  Here is a lovely bag I made at the weekend with our old house on as last good bye:

As you can see it is a happy bag, that will remind of the happy times we had together in the house.

Don’t worry, once I have mastered maching embroidering no 15 I will be making a bright a colourful bag with a bungalow on for our new home!

Busy Couple of Weeks!

The last couple of weeks have crazy at funky diva designs!

I have been working on a number of projects:

1. 12 Purses for a beautiful bride to give as presents to all her lovely helpers.

2. 4 Little cupcake totes for students on Cirencester Cupcake cupcake decorating workshops.

3. The gorgeous new bag ‘Katie’. Designed as a funky school bag to carry folders and everything else a girl needs!

4. A beautiful tote and purse matching set for a little girl in Australia.

5. Another fabulous diaper bag made using cotton twill and Amy Butler fabric.

6. Beautiful blue Alice bag with custom embroidery on.

Some of these bags have already got a blog of their own, but others are waiting for their debut which will be coming over the next few days!

Still loads of lovely orders to complete so I had better get back to the sewing machine!

From Russia with Love!

This week I thought we would venture to Russia in our Monday Mosaic.  It is a huge country with a fascinating and turbulent history!  The shops on Etsy are beautiful, as you would expect!

I hope you enjoy looking!

1 MaguStudio

2 Shkolnik

3 manonknits

4 irinaj67

5 TianaCHE

6 Chernikova

7 Aurvero

8 Svetusha

I hope have enjoyed our trip to Russia!

Happy shopping!

Flickr and all that Jazz!

When I started funky diva designs I have to admit I did not know about the online world of handmade sellers.  I knew I wanted to make bags and sell them online, but I was stumped as to how to do that. Then I stumbled across Etsy and realised that there was a whole virtual world out there that is vast and ever changing.

I took the plunge and opened a shop online in November and quickly realised that just opening a shop is not enough.  When you first open a shop you think that you will be selling straight away and your items are so lovely everyone is bound to want one!  Then it dawns on you that the market place is MASSIVE!  At this point I started to panic about how I would get my beautiful bags out there for people to see. 

All the tools and advice you need are in the Etsy Forum, which can be a bit daunting because it is such a large community, but most people are helpful and supportive.  After a bit of research it became clear that there were 3 main ways letting the world know about my bags:

1. Facebook - I had a personal account, but I didn’t realise I could also have a funky diva designs account. It has been great to show people my work and keep in touch with fans about blog posts and new bag designs.
2. Twitter – I had never considered Twitter before, but now I am hooked!  I can communicate with my followers about bags, design and include some personal tweets as well.  I have met some amazing people there and I hope to meet many more.
3. Flickr - I had never heard of this site, and I have to admit that 6 months down the line I am still not sure about it.  It is an amazing place to display my work, but I just haven’t managed to get into uploading photos onto the site.

These are the 3 main sites I use for promoting my bags – and it is all free!  Through these sites I have sold bags to America as well as all over the UK.  But I sense I might be missing something…  going to have to keep working on Flickr and keep my eye out for other sites….

Market Ramblings

As you know I am based in the gorgeous Costwold town of Tetbury.  It is very pretty with loads of very old stone buildings and antique shops – I heard a rumour it is the Antique centre of the Cotswolds!

Under the town there is a market most days of the week.  Saturday is very popular as are Wednesdays as there is plant man, fruit and veg as well as an assortment of other stalls.  Infact the only day I could get a pitch was a Thursday.  Ordinarily this might be a problem, but Tetbury is the town closest to Highgrove, the official country residence of the Prince of Wales.  Infact there is even a Highgrove shop in Town where you can buy everything from soap to fruit cake all stamped with the Prince’s seal of approval!

So as a town we can get 6 coach loads a day of tourists on their way to Highgrove tours or just to look around our pretty town.  My hope is that as the spring progresses and turns into summer I may attract customers to my stall who are looking for something beautiful and little bit different…

This week Spring was not in evidence at all. The wind blew and the hail fell! It was freezing cold on the market and it took me all night to warm up again! But here are the pics of my first day of the summer session out on the markets:

I share the space with a Jewellery maker and a traditional market stall of hats, gloves and socks!

My lovely ladies look great hung up and ready to be taken home!

All of my lovely ladies sitting proud on the table!

So if you are in the Costwolds on a Thursday please come along and say hello!

The Big Bagathon!

The mission was to run 5 workshops with 30 year 10 (15 years old) gifted, able and talented students to help them design a story sack.  I then had to take their ideas and turn them into bags for them to use in presentations the next day! 5 story bags decorated, lined and sewn up in less than 24 hours was the challenge. 

The overall theme of their story sack was about food and creating a bag that would help children aged 4-6 to learn about healthy eating. They had to make games, teaching resources, a toy and something to eat ,all to fit in with the theme of the book.

All of the books the kids were given were different and each group approached the design problem in different ways.  The 30 minutes I spent with each group was brilliant.  They were so imaginative and knew what they wanted.  A few ideas they had were far to complicated for me to put together in the short time scale, but I think you will agree that the bags turned out really well!

The first book was Gobble It Up! by Jim Arnosky.  The group decided to use the front of the book as their inspiration:

Each group choose their own fabric panel at the top and handles.  This group choose fabrics that reminded them of the sea.

The next book was The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle. Again they used the front of the book for inspiration, but they put a small pocket in the middle of the flower that they used to hold cress seeds and used brown buttons to represent seeds falling.

They wanted the top of the bag to represent the sun so I curved the top panel and attached the handles to represent the rays of the sun.

The next book was Mr Wolf’s Pancakes by Jan Fearnley.  The group had a fabulous artist who drew the wolf perfectly onto the felt and I used glittering fabric for the pancakes:

I really loved the wolf and the fabric with the knives and forks.

The next group had a more traditional book, The Gingerbread Man by Ladybird.  The group wanted a pocket on the front so they could make finger puppets to put in it.  Unfortunately I didn’t get a pic of the finger puppets, which were amazing!

I really liked all of the bright colours they choose.

The final book was Oliver’s Vegetables by Vivian French.  This group were really determined to the design they wanted, so determined infact their workshop over ran by 10 minutes whilst they decided on where everything should be placed!

So there are the 5 bags that I made overnight. It was really hard work, but I it was fabulous to be able to turn the kids designs into bags.

The presentations the kids gave were amazing.  They were judged on the bag, all it’s contents and their presentation skills. I was really pleased I didn’t have to decide the winner because they were so good!

But a winner had to be choosen and it was Oliver’s Vegetables.

I hope you enjoyed reading about my latest adventure, hopefully there will be many more to follow! I am off to catch up on some sleep……

First Stall of 2010

It has been a while since I have organised a stall.  Last night I was invited to a pamper evening at a local school.

The mummys can get a reduced priced treatment and do a bit of shopping as well.  It was quite a quiet evening, but a good chance to meet some new people as well as previous customers who checked out the new bags and let me know how their bags are doing.  Their stories gave me a new idea which I am thinking out at the moment!

I thought I would show you my stall from last night.  I usually have a stand as well, but I couldn’t fit it in the car!  I will have to think about how to get around that problem!

All the bags look really pretty sitting together!

Hope you have a great weekend!

All the Colours of the Rainbow!

A couple of weeks ago I shared with you a really exciting new venture with the Colourful Coach, Cathy Dean.  Today I completed the 12 bags for the order and I am really pleased with the result.

The 12 bags had started life looking like this:

Which I then organised into bag sets:

These sets, with a lot of sewing, have turned into this:

I think you will agree that I have met Cathys design brief of bright and colourful bags!

I couldnot have done it without the wonderful shops Saint and Pinners and Fabric Rehab.  They got my fabric to me super fast and offer the best ranges in bright colours!

No rest for wicked though – on to the next project that I will share with you over the weekend…..