Monthly Archives: May 2012

Open Studios for Handmade Monday

I’m sitting in the garden outside the studio typing and listening to the birds singing whilst we wait for our visitors for the Norfolk and Norwich Open Studios.

Kit is working on a lino cut at the other end of the table…

and in the middle is a little furry helper…

It’s been fairly quiet so far today but the visitors we have had have been lovely and we’ve both made sales. Open Studios isn’t just about selling, but it would be nice to cover the entry costs and then anything else is a bonus.

My studio is looking great, so tidy! You wouldn’t believe how much I’ve got stashed away in boxes and hidden…

And it’s so lovely to be able to sit out in the garden and just enjoy the fresh air after all the wet and miserable weather which has gone on, and on, and on…

As you can imagine, I haven’t got any thing new in the way of textile creativity to show this week after all the preparations have been taken care of, but I’m still linking up to Handmade Monday over on Handmade Harbour so you can follow what’s going on on all the other creative blogs which take part.

If you only visit once a week, you may have missed the guest blog post from the Young Adult Fiction writer Thomas Taylor. There’s a chance to win a signed copy of the book and still time to enter so please don’t miss out.

Open Studios continues for another two weekends, so if you are in North Norfolk over the long Bank Holiday or the weekend after, it would be lovely to see you…

Silent Sunday

Guest Blog Post – Thomas Taylor

As promised, a guest blog post from Thomas Taylor, whose new book is launched at Heffers Book Shop in Cambridge today, 24th May 2012…

“Eddie, Adam and David have the same gift. Using their dreams they can travel in time, appearing as ghosts wherever and whenever they want. But each of them wants something different…

Eddie, the genius who discovers dreamwalking, is sworn to protect the course of history. Adam wants to use terror to change it for his own ends. And David, the novice dreamwalker who is linked to them both, must find a way to keep them apart – and save the future of the world…”

When Penny invited me to write a guest post, the first thing I wondered was how on earth I was going to link my Young Adult supernatural thriller with needle-felting and those delightful crocheted mice! Writers are supposed to be able to accomplish anything with words, right? But, er…

Well, I’ve decided I’m not even going to try to link what I do with what she does, but the reason for that isn’t creative cowardice on my part. The reason is simply that the real link lies in who we are: mother and son.

I have been thinking about ghosts since childhood, mostly because I was terrified of them. So scared, in fact, that I honestly thought I saw them as a boy. Of course, I realise now that I never did – well, probably never did, anyway – but I have spent a lot of time wondering what they may be if they do exist. And I’m sure Penny (hello, mum!) can remember how wound-up I got about it all! Over-active imaginations are never easy to live with, and I doubt she’s surprised that a haunted childhood has resulted in a book called Haunters. Certainly, I won’t deny that this book may also be a way to deal with all that childhood fear, especially now I have become a parent myself. And perhaps that’s why, in the book, only children can dreamwalk. In any case, what if ghosts aren’t something to be scared of at all, but something to be really excited about? I’d much rather that! I certainly wish my terrified, 12-year-old self could have read a book like this.

So Haunters is dedicated to Penny, for all these reasons. But also for…

…making sure there were always books around when I was little; for teaching me to love stories, and – when reading didn’t come naturally – for showing me not be afraid of words; for pointing out that behind the sofa was the best place to hide when Dr Who got scary, and then hiding there with me; for fabulating birthday cakes that made the other kids go ‘WOW!’; for never laughing at my early artistic ambitions, even though they were often laughable; for being amazing when nothing else seemed to be; for tolerating teenage fury and adolescent gloom and not biting back; for — along with her husband, Tim — providing me with the means, both moral and financial, to get through art school; for reinventing herself whilst never changing toward me; for passing on some of the magic to my own children; for leaving room behind the sofa even now.

Mum, thank you for all that, and for so much more. And thank you for letting my spooky book onto your blog!

I feel much better now. Honest…

But how about you, dear reader? Would you like to win a signed copy of Haunters? Simply leave a comment here to be entered into a draw on the 1st of June. Add a scary ‘hiding behind the sofa’ anecdote to your comment, and get yourself entered twice. Good luck! And good reading….

Thank you, Thomas… I’m off to find the tissues….

Edited to Add: Thanks so much for all the lovely comments – we’ve had so much fun reading them and some great trips down memory lane with your ‘behind the sofa moments’! It was quite difficult to choose between them, but in the end it was KateUK’s Aunty Betty who won through, making us snort with laughter with this story…

“The whole family used to hide behind the sofa when Aunty Betty came up the drive – not just us, my Aunt, Uncle and cousins would do it too at their house. If her car was spotted everyone just dropped like stones behind the nearest piece of large furniture until she went away. She was the sort of lady who, if the doorbell wasn’t answered, would peer in through windows, so we became REALLY good at hiding. Daleks? Pah! Small fry.”

Anyway, anyone with a scary relative like that in their childhood deserves to win a prize!

Thank you to all who took part, I’m sorry you couldn’t all win a copy of the book, but it should be available in most good bookshops or of course, Amazon. (If your local bookshop doesn’t have a copy by the way, order it and create a demand! This is the pushy mother speaking here!)

Mini Mice for a Crochet Handmade Monday

I wish I could share this beautiful tree in a shaft of sunlight with a blue sky background, but alas the gloom of the last few days makes me worry if I wait for the sun to come out, all the blossom will have faded and died. It tends to run in a two year cycle, last year there were about three flowers, this years it’s really going to town!

I seem to have spent so much time over the past week with my head down, working, that things are popping out in the garden and I’m missing them. I’m hopelessly behind with the Garden Diaries, I was full of good intentions but there is only one of me, and it’s a bit of a struggle to not only do it all, but write about it too!

We’re really in the run up to the Norfolk and Norwich Open Studios now, doors open next Saturday for three weekends, which is both scary and exciting. We’re not novices this year though, we had a really positive experience last year, so we’re looking forward to it.

In between winding many, many little balls of cotton over the last week for the Rainbow Mouse Kits I’ve been working on a new pattern and I’ve just finished making the prototype in time to show it to my Handmade Monday chums… I seem to be in the grip of a mouse obsession at the moment, both crochet and needlefelt and I can’t quite move on from it yet. I wanted to devise something small, to use up those little oddments of yarn which might otherwise be wasted, so I’ve now got a teeny, tiny mini mouse!

I couldn’t let him be lonely…

…and in the end of course, there had to be one of each colour… and then I thought… MAGNETS!

I’ve had quite a lot of fun playing with them….!

I hope to write the pattern before too long and I’ll put it on the Etsy shop, although if you’ve bought a Planet Penny Yarn pack I will send you the pattern on request. I’m thinking about a kit too, but does anyone know whether sending magnets through the mail, especially overseas, is a potential problem? I hate to think of one of my ‘pink parcels’ being detonated in a car park somewhere!

If you are a Handmade Monday regular and wondering about the rest of the wedding bits and pieces, I wrote about it in my last post which you will find here. It’s worth a visit just to see the amazing wedding cake made entirely from….well I won’t spoil it, go and take a peek!

Next week, hopefully on Thursday, I will publish my first ever Guest Post. If you have children, or grandchildren aged 10+ or are an avid reader yourself come back to meet the author Thomas Taylor, talking about his novel, ‘Haunters’, which is published next week. (It’s dedicated to me and Tim, it’s amazing what people will do to be allowed on Planet Penny!!!)

I’ll leave you with a link to Wendy’s Handmade Harbour so you can visit all the other Handmade Monday blogs, and yet more mice…

See you soon….squeak! x

Silent Sunday

The Merry Month of May….

Everything seems to be happening in the merry month of May 2012! In the spirit of chasing along so as not to get left behind…

…and before I run out of time…

I know…sorry!

I’m squeezing in an extra post so I don’t get completely overwhelmed with things to say, photos to show and no time.

So, May….first of all, there are three birthdays. Poor Tim drew the short straw having to go back to work on his birthday. The Carrot Cake recipe must come out in time for his return home I feel! Then of course there was the wedding… I do have some more photos to share, don’t worry, but they won’t be of the Mother-of-the-Groom. A line must be drawn! And, my own big news, Planet Penny is now officially a business. Not perfect timing but things were running away from me, and I needed it all to be official.

The Norfolk and Norwich Open Studios event is fast approaching, in fact it’s the weekend after next. There is still loads to do, but we’ll get there, and if anyone is in the Norfolk area it would be SO lovely to see you. You can find out all about it here.

The next big exciting thing though is next week, and it’s the launch of my son Thomas’ debut novel in Heffer’s bookshop in Cambridge. Obviously I’m a proud mum, but I’m not alone in thinking he’s pretty special and you can read a bit about the launch here. And of course if you are in the Cambridge area you could join in too, and come and say hello, I’ll be the one with a proud grin from ear to ear!

Thomas is going to write the very first Guest Post for Planet Penny in the next few days, too, so do look out for that.

But back to the wedding, and the decorations. We had Wedding Trees! It had started in the back of my mind as painted branches on which to hang little pretties, but with the help of St Serendipity again, we found two beautifully shaped Japanese Maples in pots. At the time they were completely bare, but just in time they put out the most beautiful red leaves which were still small enough for an overall lacy effect, and I draped them with little white lights, tiny white calico hearts and paper doves…

But the thing which occupied most of my time in the run up to the wedding was the cake topper. I’d had a particular idea in mind from the moment I heard it was going to be a cheese cake. and I don’t mean a cheesecake, I mean a cake made of CHEESE! Wallace and Gromit would be proud!

It had to be mice, didn’t it? And I didn’t let the fact that there weren’t actually any bridesmaids, or even a pageboy put me off…

And the chef made an amazing job of putting the whole construction together…

I have to say it was delicious too, and very much appreciated by all the family, complete cheese fanatics every one!

Finally, a Planet Penny Cotton Club update. I have just moved the yarn packs, Rainbow Mouse Kits and patterns on to the Folksy shop. I’ve been a little overwhelmed by the administration involved selling them directly, I need time to be creative or I just don’t function! It all seems to be working well but let me know if you have a problem.

See you soon…x