Hello again…don’t the weeks come round quickly!  It’s been very busy on Planet Penny over the last few days as we’re in the process of turning a storage area into an office, so having moved everything out for Tim to work on it my studio is CHAOS!  It’ll be so good when it’s finished, I might be able to find things more easily (pause for hollow laughter!) but the main perk will be having the printer/scanner in the same room that I’m working in, instead of several rooms and a fight of stairs away.  I suppose the exercise is good for me, but it makes things take twice as long!  In the meantime I’ve been needlefelting and playing with Ocean Blue dye, and little flowery buttons…

Remember the little robins of last week?  I had a cunning plan for their use, and it worked out very well.  I found some pretty natural and red woven ribbon, just enough to make five of these…

…and put them on the Planet Penny Facebook page to see what the reaction would be.  Despite several of you telling me off for mentioning the dreaded ‘C’ word (!!) I sold three before I even put them on Etsy, where there is now just one left!  Don’t despair however, there will be more, but they’ll be just a little different.  I don’t do mass production I’m afraid!

I have also completed a variation on the the Love Birds as I couldn’t source the straw wreath straight away, the latest ones have natural colour lambswool hearts…

…and three of these have made it as far as the Etsy shop!

And my other creative project the week has involved a spot of dyeing!  I have such problems finding clothes I like, that fit, that are long enough, and I rarely find all that and in a colour I like.  So when I found a tunic top in Cotton Trader’s sale which ticked all the boxes bar the colour one I snapped it up and went off to the local supermarket for a packet of dye…

Take one shirt like this…

…in a cotton linen mix, and add a packet of this…

and a few pretty buttons..and you end up with this…

I’ve ordered two more!

(This might amuse you: Having decided to change the basic white buttons to something more original I carefully sorted an interesting selection of colours snipped off the white ones and replaced them with the pretty flower ones  – I hate sewing on buttons, don’t you?  I had just finished ironing it and had hung it on a hanger to admire when my beloved OH came in.  “Yes,” he said, “That looks really good.  Now all you have to do is change the buttons…”

I say nothing!) 

There was lots of interest last week about Higgins’ ‘Thundershirt’.  He’s actually wearing it at the moment as a storm has just passed by and it does seem to calm him down a lot.  He usually goes and sits on the back doormat and trembles but this time I wrapped him in the shirt and popped him into bed where he snuggled down and look reasonable relaxed.  It was only a small storm so more testing will need to be done, but so far the signs are good.

I must finish this and go and administer tea to the worker in my little ‘soon-to-be’ office, it’s not the weather to be sawing wood!  I’ll leave you with the usual link to ‘Handmade Monday’ over on Handmade Harbour.

Have a lovely week and I’ll be back soon…x