SOLD

The Andrew Logan "On Your Marks" exhibition closed today and...

... i sold a painting....yaaaay.....so excited.

We've spent the last few weeks being busy getting the house sorted ready for our summer visitors, Cathy, Garth and family arrived last Friday night for a flying visit, a stop over before a wedding in Chester, it was lovely to see them all.  We had a mad dash to get the guest bedroom finished....remember this?

 and this?

Well this is now. 

The wardrobe, as you know we found at the auction last week was the finishing touch for this room, it looks amazing.

 I painted two old battered chairs in yellow "1829" paint to use as bedside tables and the hearts/flowers/birds hanging above the bed was a collection of bits and bobs we picked up on our holiday in Northumberland a few years ago.

 The patchwork bedcover is a modern one from Cavania and is doubled over here, we also have a blue and pink one! The blanket folded over the end of the bed is a gorgeous vintage cover that i picked up from a boot sale a few years ago.  The gorgeous button cushions are from Jo's daughter Max of Tilly Tea Dance and are available at Indigo Moon and her etsy shop.

 The middle floor corridor

 nearly finished, we found two gorgeous limited edition prints of Hares from the art gallery at Bishops Castle by Eileen Turner

 and two old printer trays which will eventually go on the wall as "Cabinets of Curiosities", collecting things at the moment.

 I love these chairs, when we bought them we weren't entirely sure where they would go but they're perfect here.

 Gorgeous hand made vase from the gallery here in Montgomery, the handle is coated in gorgeous green glass from recycled bottles, but, i can't remember the name of the artist, sorry.

The Bathroom

Best to ignore the red curtains here - i'm still trying to find what will work.  I love this bathroom, it's mostly Nicci's at the moment (she shares it with visitors) the roll top bath is lovely painted in this symphony grey with silver feet. 

 ...and this gorgeous jar with soap and bath bombs in is Nicci's touch

 So thats the house so far, all the mess has moved to the top floor for the time being but that's off bounds to everyone except me and Gav so it works out ok.  We're just doing a few alterations in the kitchen and then we'll make a start on the top floor.

THese made me laugh.  When nicci moved here a few weeks ago she brought a load of old photos from the attic...i love this one i took of her, she was about nine or ten years old and was dressed up as victorian child ready for a school trip to St Fagans...so cute.

 and this...OMG me with my junior school class!!!!  i'm front row second from the left...Ha!  Probably the same age as Nicci in the photo above!  Scary!!

"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing".George Bernard Shaw

Olympic Art

These areThree pieces of my art ready for the

"On Your Marks"

Exhibition at the Andrew Logan, Museum of Sculpture Festival 

this Saturday

Can't wait to see my lovely sister this weekend,the whole family are travelling down for a family wedding in Chester and are staying overnight on Friday so we've been getting our guest room ready and picked up a gorgeous wardrobe at the Harry Ray Auction  which was just the right size and only £50

It was hells own job getting it from the town hall and up the stairs, but worth it.  It has a kind of Art Nouveau look to it, i love these little carvings of ships on each side

Also we bought a huge cupboard for the kitchen, it  needs painting but will be great as a Pantry,

 I love all that cupboard space, we can get rid of some of the horrid IKEA cabinets now!!

 "Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath"
Michael Caine

Didn't realise i hadn't blogged for a few weeks, where does all the time go?  The weather has been glorious over the last few weeks and we've had some lovely long evening walks with Lizzie.

I've still got a chronic poorly back and had to stop and rest against gates on the way round

We love this walk around the Lymore Estate,

this is the beginning of the walk and the views over the Shropshire Hills in the distance are gorgeous

Goats!

makes a change from sheep i guess!

Lymore Lake

Lizzie's favourite watering hole

Walking back home

My gorgeous Lizzie cooling off in the stream at White Gate

I bought these chairs at an auction about eighteen months ago, (they're IKEA) and painted them with "1829" chalky paint and put them outside the shop for sale.

...and this is an Art Deco hall stand we bought last year - painted Persian Blue

I've really enjoyed painting furniture this week, they were all pieces we had stored in our stock room and it's nice to get them in the shop at last and make a bit of room.

Gorgeous flowers today from friends

I put them in my new shop window display, which was all vintage stock this time.

My gorgeous baby girl has finally moved here permanently with us this week after finishing her college course and is now a qualified make up artist, with ambitions to get into film.  She's got herself a job as well as a place on the committee helping with the Berriew summer festival, i love her being here with us and i'm so proud of her.

"Being a force of good in the world and honouring my core values is about saying yes to my heart and saying yes to the hearts of those who pass through my life.  It's about standing as close to the flame of truth as possible and meeting each day with as much integrity and honesty as i can muster"

 - Liz Kalloch (adapted)

A change is as good as a rest...

...So the saying goes.

Life seems like one constant change at the moment, especially at Indigo Moon.  Just as we organise one thing and seem happy with it, something else gets us thinking and changing, i suppose it's our creative nature and our strong desire to continue successfully.

Firstly though, i wanted to show you these little collaged brooches i've been making.  Back by popular demand!  I've had so many requests to make more of these and spent all last week finishing them off although i did run out of pins for the last twenty or so.

 Here's the process as requested:

Small wooden discs (brooch size), any shape

 Old ephemera, i like the old natural writing.  These are a batch of letters from a daughter to her parents whilst at boarding school and through early marriage dating from the 1940's

 Cut into circles

 pasted on the wooden discs

 painted

 more painting

 ...i'm sure you get the idea...

and Voila!

 narrative pasted on and i also add a bit of gold here and there, once pins are on the back they're good to go.

We're quite excited about the few changes we made in the shop this last week.  It was done very quickly once we'd made up our minds:

Greetings cards: 

 we already do a range of nice greeting cards, but we thought we'd expand the range to cater for a few more people, we sell a lot of what we did have, but we also had a few people saying that we didn't quite have what they wanted.

 We spent most of the week calling around various card suppliers getting stock, i won't go into too much detail but they're a funny bunch.  Here we are in a recession, a double dip recession at that, all sorts of financial doom and gloom across the media and they need board meetings before they'll decide whether they'll take your money or not - it's really bizarre.  However we did manage to get the few companies we liked on board...and are still waiting for a few others.

We had planned to build some racks out of wooden shelving, but then we decided to get acrylic shelving instead and we're glad we did as it's much nicer.

 ...and now for the really exciting stuff:

 SWEETS!!!!!

 We bought some traditional sweets and some glass jars to put them in, Gav built these shelves and i lined them with a 1890's french newspaper.  We still have a bit more work to do on this, but it looks good to start with.  We made our own labels for the jars

 ...bought some pretty pink and white sweety bags...

.... and printed off some labels to hang on the bag, they looked great in the shop at one pound for a hundred gram bag of sweets of your choice.  We didn't put them out until about 2pm yesterday and had sold seven bags when we closed the shop

...not bad for our first few hours.

 Naughty puppy....

needless to say when i was making up the bags of sweets a few fell to the floor (i'll have to get the hang of it) and this little snaffle hound was there waiting, ready to pounce - she'd just nabbed four fizzy cola bottles here and i had to prise her jaws apart to get them off her - this was me telling her off, her ears go right back when i do that and she always looks to the side as if to say "Who, me...i wouldn;t dare"

so darn cute!!!!

and last but not least, to finish off a nice day...

...we went to see Jack Dee at Theatr Hafren in Newtown last night, hilariously funny, especially his bit about "teenagers" !!!!!

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“What I want is what I've got, and what I need is all around me.”

Dave Matthews Band - adapted