Yaaaaaaaaaaaaay.....i sold one of my green chairs in the shop today, i only put them in yesterday, i'm soooooooooooooooooooooo pleased!!!!

Treasures

Gavin and I went to an auction in a little village called Westbury, nr Shrewsbury last night and these are some of the things we got (some of the items came from a car boot sale).

Chairs

I found these gorgeous vintage wooden chairs at a boot sale a few weeks ago. I meant to take a photo of them before i painted them, but forgot until i was half way through the last one!! Anyway, you can see the original colour here.

I painted them in a gorgeous jade eggshell wash and sanded them back to give a distressed look, then put them in the shop, they look really nice.

Well earned day off

I've had such a lovely day today. The shop is shut on Mondays and we decided to get out for a few hours. We couldn't go far as we have a rock star visiting us tomorrow (Gav's filming an interview here) and we needed to get back to tidy up and for Gav to prepare his filming equipment. We combined our time with a quick visit to one of our suppliers in Shrewsbury for more stock and then headed back down to Clun, for a nice lunch, a walk along the river and a walk to the castle. This is Clun, in Shropshire, (not my photo i found it on the internet).

This is the bridge over the river and the brown brick building you see on the right is where we intended to go for lunch, except it was shut.So we wandered across the bridge and up to the town in search of a cafe. Gav and i are on a quest to find the perfect baked potato, our experience of baked potatoes in cafes so far have been so dire that we don't usually order them anymore...but.....today we decided to try once more and stopped at this llittle cafe. Gav ordered Tuna and sweetcorn with his and i ordered baked beans with cheese.
The first thing i noticed when mine arrived was little blue bits of mould on the cheese, i thought i was seeing things, then i asked gav to taste it (Ha!) i thought there's no way that anyone would put blue cheese on a baked potato, i like blue cheese but it's a very acquired taste. Gav thought it was blue cheese, i thought it wasn't and that it tasted gone off. As i tentatively pushed the cheese around the plate i found a few more bits of, what i was now convinced was mould on gone off cheese. How desperate am i? i was so hungry i pushed all the cheese and beans to the side of the plate and continued to eat the potato and started on the substantial salad served with it. INow,i must admit here that the potato was actually very nice, in fact the nicest i'd ever had in a cafe (had i found the elusive perfect baked potato i wondered) However, as i picked up a forkful of salad i'm confronted by bits of gone-off purified lettuce covering everything, and was so put off i couldn't eat anymore so we paid and left. Gav's salad was the same, although he finished most of it before he discovered it was past it's best. Yeuch!!!! What is wrong with people? they charge enough for food when you eat out, the least they could do is make sure the food is within date, even if they can't cook it properly, there was no excuse it's slovenly and lazy, i'm sure they wouldn't have eaten it themselves.

We consoled ourselves with a white magnum ice cream and have decided that we'll take our own food out with us from now on.

However, none of this detracted from our lovely walk around the town, across the river and up to the castle. It was such a beautiful day, it was a very romantic, hand-in-hand walk, we talked about the wedding and how lucky we were to have our lovely shop and be our own bosses, admired the gorgeous scenery and soaked up the warmth. I was so relaxed when we got back i decided to leave the cleaning until tomorrow morning. I'm sure i'll regret that tomorrow.

Off to bed now, Nos da xx

From this humble piece of leftover wood innocently left leaning against the wall...

...then cut into little squares...
...and gently sanded and gesso'd
...to these gorgeous wooden pin brooches...

...and then put in the shop!!!!

Cutie cat...Alice asleep on the coffee table!

Some of my fabric hearts in a pretty basket.

These retro scarves are so pretty, we've sold loads, they looked lovely with sun on them

I bought these old wooden reels last year in a charity shop in Leeds, i wanted to use them in the shop so i bought these lovely organza ribbons to go around them...

i wanted spotty ribbon, but am still looking for that...

Gav got this lovely little french pot from the auction in Llangollen yesterday, it was in amongst a boxful of china for £10 - we then saw the pot on Ebay for £50!!! but that was with a lid, this one didn't have one! It's still pretty though.

Lots of lovely soap, this is selling so well we ordered another ten bars, it looks so colourful.

Lots of lovely buttonsNicci' dress she's altering...with all my supplies i might add

...and her patchwork quilt she's making, also from all my fabric supplies...i'm not happy that she managed to cut up a pair of my curtains thinking they were scrap!!!!! they were patchwork ones so she cut out a few different squares out of the different designs on them!

So excited...

I just have to tell you all.

I submitted some of my artwork for publication in "Cloth Paper Scissors" Magazine and they've accepted. I think i'm going to be in the March/April issue next year, they're going to contact me with more details in the next few weeks.

I did some assemblage collage on wood using old dress pattern paper and called it the "simplicity" series. They asked me to get copyright permission from Simplicity to use their logo, which i did and they agreed today.

I'm on cloud nine...

Yesterday morning as Gavin, Nicole and I were off to the Sunday Market, at 8am (Much to Nicci's disgust), when we realised that our shop still had the "Open" sign showing. Yes...we'd forgotten to turn the sign over yet again.

This was a makeshift one we did quickly when we opened and as you can see it's held on with blu tac. It's quite fiddly and didn't look very nice, whenever i did manage to change it over i usually put it upside down!!!

So....when we got back i decided enough was enough and set about making my own permanent one. I found the perfect sized piece of wood, gesso'd it and layered it with old book pages, then grabbed some metallic purple, two tone green and blue paints and painted and rubbed back and painted again, then rubbed back again revealing some of the page words. I then found some large rubber (letters and numbers) stamps and stamped "Open" and "Closed" on the back and front of the block in the metallic purple, then i edged the letters in black felt and put two little hooks on it and placed it in the door window. Here's what it looks like, i may do a few more arty things on it, but it'll do for now, don't you think?
As we closed the shop yesterday at 5pm the sun came out and we decided to go for a quick walk around the town, the gardens look lovely

Tall Chimneys


Rain on the roses

Isn't this house beautiful, i love the windows, it's near bunners on Arthur Street and is currently up for sale (for £450,000). It's an old building and for years belonged to the doctors in the town.

These old enamel signs from an age gone by are lovely. This is outside Bunners.

This is a little seating area just opposite Bunners, the path into the trees on the right leads up to the castle. It's an uneven path and gets steeper as you move along, it's beautiful, but Gavin and I refer to it as the "treacherous" route to the castle...you need good footwear!

Wherever you are in Montgomery you can see St Nicholas' church tower and clock. This is from Arthur Street.

I love these steps, the house belongs to a lovely lady called Rita, she used to run a bed and breakfast but has since given it up, however she does still rent out the little cottage to the side of it.

Quaint little cottage (Rita's)

Our shop, Indigo Moon, closing time on a Sunday afternoon.