Silver cotton reels and a lost summer

It has been a busy summer. Open Studios was as lovely as ever. In fact the Saturday afternoon of my final open weekend turned into a sort of woolly garden party to which Celia, Val and Deborah brought their respective yarn projects and crocheted in the sun whilst I brought them pots of tea and homemade biscuits. I was on Radio Cambridgeshire for five minutes on Friday 25th July talking about Open Studios. New friends were made, necklaces found new homes and, as ever, the phenomenon of Open Studios and its power to bring like-minded people together surprised me and introduced me to creative folk with whom I will stay in touch. 

The summer also brought new plans for Comic Relief 2015. There'll be more news on this soon, but I'm working on something potentially very exciting with Jane Toft, ex-editor of Mollie Makes magazine. We hope that the project will build on the success of the Red Nose Day Dolls and the £4300 of handmade cash that we raised thanks to the wonderful support of bloggers and the talent of the 22 designers who contributed, amongst other handmade wonder, diminutive blankets (above) perfect tiny dresses, needle felted dogs and miniscule handmade books. 

In the last few months I have been writing articles for an exciting new online magazine that will launch in the next week or two. I'll be able to reveal more once the first edition is out.

All these offline adventures alongside the school holidays have meant that there have been tumbleweeds blowing around my blog, but now that the girls have returned to school there will be more time for sharing the news here.

I have been working on commissions as busily as ever, including this moon gazing hare pendant which was an honour to make. Every week or two I receive a request to make one of these fine silver cotton spool necklaces. It hs become such as regular design for me that I decided to make a small batch of them to list on Etsy. This allowed me to imagine that I had my own very small haberdasher's shop in manner of Sylvanian families. Click here if you'd like to have a peep at them. You can choose your own thread colour.

Meanwhile my sweetpeas continue to flower and it's still sandal weather. Unlike most months, September's sunshine seems to be reliable.