Has it been that long already...

I knew when I started this blog that I was unlikely to update it as often as I planned, but this is ridiculous! I really had intended to update a bit more regularly than this, but sometimes I guess life just gets in the way.

So what's kept me away for so long, well, knitting, knitting, some sewing with felt, knitting & a bit of card making. That's just on the craft front, obviously the full time job & 2 year old daughter have also had something to do with it.

Don't really know where to start, there has been so much going on. I guess a good place would be the knitting group, which I'm pleased to report is going really well. We're still meeting on the 2nd Monday of every month and membership is growing, albeit at what I like to think of as a steady pace. Once we had a few meetings under our belt it came time to think of a name for ourselves and much racking of brains and knitting related punning went on.

In the end, it was the fact that a few of our members are more sewers than knitters that inspired a more inclusive choice of name and the 'Urban Craft Collective' was born. For those of us familiar with music of the 90's the name seems to kind of stick in the brain as you subconsciously start humming "I've got the key, I've got the secret.." and wonder whatever did happen to the Urban Cookie Collective.

Our group outing to the Create and Craft show I mentioned in the last blog, although a very nice day out, did leave us all feeling slightly let down. There weren't much in the way of knitting stalls & a lot of what was on sale was quite twee (but twee in an icky sugary way, not a Cath Kidston-esque elegantly twee kind of way) and so it got us to thinking, surely we could better ourselves. It turns out we had all pondered on the idea of having a go at doing a stall ourselves over the years but time constraints of actually getting enough stock together had generally stopped us in our tracks. It seemed like a bit of a missed opportunity with a group of such multi-talented crafters like ourselves though & so before you knew it we'd kicked around the idea of all clubbing our efforts together & I was hunting down an appropriate craft fair for our first foray into retail.

A bit of digging on the net & I soon discovered a company who were organising a fair as part of the Hope St Feast in Liverpool which seemed like a good place to start and so a booking form was sent off & with a couple of months to go the knitting started in earnest.

Prior to deciding to do the stall & having to come up with ideas for what kind of stuff might sell, I'd had a couple of kids birthdays to make stuff for. It was my niece & nephews birthdays respectively, nephews first & his love of dinosaurs meant this was the perfect gift for him:

I bought the pattern from Etsy & it involved knitting in the round & shaping. I have to confess this finished dino is actually the second attempt as my first effort was truly awful. So awful in fact I couldn't bring myself to take any pics, although perhaps I should of done in case I ever need to look at something to give me a good laugh.

The other pressie was for my niece and was a lovely little felt bunny made with a kit my Mum had bought me as a gift when we were at the craft show. It was the first time I'd made a toy with felt and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. Felt is such a great material to work with, it's very tolerant as it doesn't fray when you cut it & yet very soft & easy to sew. Although the little bunny was pretty cute when she was finished, it felt a bit like it was missing something, so I freestyled a dress for her, with an appliqued daisy on the front, which worked out as a really nice finishing touch. I did take a pic of her, but I took it with my Mum & Dad's camera & haven't got round to getting them yet, so I will stick a pic up if I ever get round to doing that.

I also had another very important present to make, which was for my Mum's birthday. I really wanted to knit something for her, but as her birthday is in June it needed to be something light weight. I found a lovely wool, Patons Morocco, which I thought could be nice, but as it's quite textured I needed to find the right pattern. After a lot of experimenting, I finally settled on a pattern which looked a bit like a wave and set to making a scarf. Sadly I ran out of time before it was quite as long as I would like it to be, but it was still nice and it felt great to be able to give a truly handmade gift to Mum as I knew she would appreciate the effort that had gone in to it.

So once the gifts were done my attention turned to the upcoming stall. I reasoned that with only a couple of months to get stuff made I needed to be making stuff which was relatively quick & cost effective. Neck warmers seemed to be the way forward, rarely using more than 1 skein of wool & generally knitted up in 1 -2 nights. I spent quite a lot of time experimenting with various patterns until I found the right ones. Eventually a herringbone design & also a really clever pattern for a flower scarf/headband raised themselves to the dizzy heights of the chosen ones.

I had also been inspired by the felt bunny and wanted to do a bit more with felt. The bunny took a couple of nights to make and I wanted something a bit quicker so I thought some felt animal ornaments could work. Throughout the summer I had become a bit obsessed with all things owl and so inspiration was easy to come by for my first ornament. Realising not everyone might be as owl obsessed as me I also branched out (ha ha, a bit of accidental punning there) into elephants & butterfly's.

I'd also decided that I was gonna need to pick a name for my little craft venture and this proved to be just as difficult as trying to decide on a name for the group, in fact maybe even worse. I'd come up with several possibly candidates, the first was Boo Bear Balina, a nickname for our daughter, but it just didn't sit right & so my second choice was 'What Katie Did', but a quick google search turned up the fact that it's a range of lingerie by Katie Price, not really the kind of association I was looking for. I kept kicking around variations on names including the word Boo as I really wanted my daughter to be represented in the name because she is an important part of why I am trying to do something more with my life & then my lovely husband John suggested "True Boo". I loved it straight away & so it stuck.

Next came the search for a logo and once again Etsy provided the answer. I found a wonderful shop called 'Run Ellie Run' in which a talented designed called Dana has a number of designs for rubber stamps which included a too cute image of two owls, a big one and a little one, sitting on the branch. It immediately captured my attention & a few e-mails later the design for my new logo was sorted & a rubber stamp ordered.

As the stall grew closer I began to get a bit panicky that I hadn't made enough stuff and that the other girls might be struggling too, but I needn't have worried, everyone did the most amazing work. My Mum (Jenny) especially was an absolute legend, she really threw herself full force into getting stuff made & ended up with a wonderful assortment of hats, scarves, fingerless mitts & bags. Jenny had focussed on buying really nice quality wool in wonderful colour ways & the end result was a dazzling array of expertly knitted accessories.

The other girls concentrated on fabric crafts & we were lucky enough to be able to ultimately display a great variety of items including some inspired felt birds with an ingeniously concealed tape measure, stunning padded lap top covers, felt & crocheted brooches, beautiful hand made buttons, fabric keyrings & gorgeous bags.

The day ended up being a great success & we all had a lot of fun doing it so it's onwards and upwards for us all & the next stall is already being planned. I can't help but dream of a future of part time work balanced with a successful craft enterprise, but I'm desperately trying to keep that in check & just concentrate on one stall at a time for now.

So if you fancy coming along, you'll need to buy tickets for Becher Race Day at Aintree Race Course on Sun 21st November & you'll find us running a stall at the Christmas Craft Fair (http://www.aintree.co.uk/pages/autumn-winter-racing-weekends-sunday-21st-november/)

In the meantime, check out some pics from the last stall:

The stall was done just in time for me to turn my attentions to another gift, a present for our friend's daughters' Christening. When another of my friends had seen the felt animal ornaments I'd made, she'd suggested that it might be worth having a go at making some felt letters as they have the advantage that people will often buy more than one to make up a word. It's was a great idea and provided the inspiration for a nice Christening gift, her name spelt out in felt letters. I had this image in my head of the letters being hung from buttons attached to a length of ribbon so decided to give it a go. It was really fun to make, choosing individual colours and adornments for each letter. I was pretty pleased with the result, which ended up like this: