New teatowels featuring Hares and Crows

Very excited to share these two new tea towel designs - Three Hares and Flock of Crows. They are two of my favourites and it is great to be able to have them as teatowels as well as original lino prints. I know lots of people hang tea towels as wall hangings too, so multi purpose! These have been printed onto unbleached organic cotton and are now listed in my online shop just HERE - ready for posting out around the world :)

Tea towels for Autumn fairs - real life and virtual...

Stocked up with a new batch of British Wildlife and Bristol tea towels in these amazing zingy colours - great timing as I have a few dates in the diary for the Autumn in real life and also in virtual life.

I have added them to my ETSY SHOP too if you want to hop over and take a look there - at the moment they are available in Pink, Yellow, Blue, Grey and just a couple of Peach.  Looking forward to seeing which colours are the popular ones this season!  A bright pop of candy pink could be just the thing...

 The Bristol tea towels are going to head off to our local Etsy Pop Up shop this Christmas, but I am sure they will find their way online too before the month is out.

Fog bound photos

It is funny how once you have an idea of the shape your day will take it is so very hard to change plans completely!

I WILL take photos of tea towels and prints.  Just because there are 100 meters of fog rising above my house, which yesterday took until 4 o'clock to clear, and therefore no chance of any sun or even proper sunlight, I will not be put off!!

I really want a new set of photos of my lino prints - it's a hard thing to do, making a flat piece of paper look like an exciting must have product (well for me, you may find that is your natural talent).  I could just scan them, but where is the challenge in that?

Well, not put off until I see what the photos look like!  Ha!  Fog, you have beaten me.

I think I'll go and join the fog and play on the allotment instead today...

last months art trail

That was a long time ago!!

Our local art trail has faded into a distant memory, but it was a lovely sunny weekend and so many friends and neighbours and people I'd never met before came and visited my little stall and chatted and nattered and told me what they thought of my work (with their body language if not their words!).

I loved it and spent a very happy two days sampling cakes and trying not to buy art (that 'trying not' failed, as I did buy art, but hey, it was an arts trail...)

Here's a photo of part of my display, and it's not a black and white photo, it really was very monochrome with a lovely shade of greeny-grey on the wall behind me setting everything off so well.

Arts Trail weekend

This weekend is our local Arts Trail - sorry for going on about it as you probably live miles and miles away, but I'm really excited!  If you are local, I'm going to be at the Southville Centre this year and would love to see you.

I've been getting lots of new things ready for it, framing up pictures, packing up tea towels and making pocket mirrors too and I'm looking forward to finding out what people think of the prints I've made in the last couple of months - there's nothing like watching the looks on peoples faces as they look at your work to tell you if you've got it right!!

just time to buy a print!

You know there is still just time for you to buy a print from my Folksy shop  if you live in the UK don't you? - or a tea towel, or a canvas bag - it really would save a trek around the shops in the rain listening to Slade and fighting your way through a jungle of tinsel and mince pies...just saying...although you may well have got all that sort of thing organised already... I haven't - eeeeek!

fabulous fibre

My family have had a thing about fibre for a while now, first my grandad and then my mother and I think it may have worked its way through to me too.  Many a happy weekend in my childhood was spent looking around carpet factories and spinning mills (not so many of those around these days) and the sound of the knitting machine lulled me to sleep through my childhood.

So this tea towel, while slightly obscure to some, seems almost inevitable to me and surely we all need to celebrate the strange places we can get fibre from?

If you sit still with a spinning wheel in a public place then it will not be long before someone comes over to ask whether you can spin the dog hair they have been carefully saving every time Shep/Fluffles/Fang has a big moult (the polite answer being that you have an awful lot on for the next ten years...) but there are some equally strange animals that do supply fibre in real life, and probably some as equally smelly.

Crumpled enough?

ello design

WEDNESDAY, 17 AUGUST 2011

Folksy Wednesday Wishlist #8

After a week off, the Wednesday Wishlist returns with a veggie theme! My grandparents used to have a lot of vegetables in their garden; tomatoes, potatoes, runner beans etc. so this blog is inspired by them and their love of gardening/vegetables :) enjoy

Melanie Wickham Lino Prints  /  Sixteen Eighteen

Bumbleblue  /  Sunshine and Snowdrops

Great to have my Allotment teatowel featured by Leanne on her blog feature "Folksy Wednesday Wishlist", this week all with a veggie theme.  Yummy items, especially love the peas in a pod, have a look at the whole selection here.

things for folksy, but...

I've got a big pile of prints which I'm going to list on Folksy (let's be realistic and say 'in the next two weeks') but there is just one thing stopping me - the ironing.  I know I can crop the pictures, but if I just did some ironing (ever) then the photos would be a whole lot better, especially when it comes to tea towels and canvas bags.  Maybe this post will encourage a friend or relative to rush round, exasperated at the feebleness of a non-ironer, in-order to sort out the sorry state of my tablecloths, tea towels and bags.  I don't iron anything, ever - just imagine how scruffy my family are...

My excuses this week include chicks, quails, shallots needed harvesting, glorious sunshine and really glorious sunshine...

tea towels ready to deliver

My new dockside tea towels are going to be in the museum shop at Bristol's nearly open museum 'MShed' - it opens on the 17th June so they are busy putting all the stock in ready and it looks really exciting because they are going to have lots of local Bristol artists, makers, crafts people and other local goodies (even some Bristol made chocolates - yum)...and quite right too for a museum about and for the people of Bristol!

Meanwhile it is quite exciting seeing all the tea towels piled up together ready to deliver...

new tea towel

....at last it's time to show everyone my new teatowel - hurray...

...this one is very specific to Bristol, so don't worry if you've not been here!  Locals will recognise the cranes and the tug 'John King' which are a great local landmark down on the dockside.  We've got a new museum opening down there in mid-June and I thought this would be a good celebration of all things 'dockside' while we are all in the mood.

(I should have waited for a better day to take a photo, but I couldn't - it's been extra windy here for days now and that really does not lend itself to outdoor tea towel photography - I was too impatient for a calm, sunny day and will take some better ones soon)

Domestic Sluttery

I noticed today that the lovely people at Domestic Sluttery .....

...have run a little feature on my tea towel and given my Folksy shop a plug. You can count me suitably chuffed - it's a really fun blog, and it's great they found me as I've only been Folksying for a little bit... but I'm also chuffed that they thought one of my teatowels was comparable in cuteness to this video!

spring sunshine

Every blog I look at this week seems to be celebrating the spring sunshine

I think we were all ready for it this year, so that's a good excuse for me to join in with a sunny washing line shot of another teatowel....

I waited weeks to take these...and I imagine that all these little creatures are enjoying the spring sunshine too (maybe not the slug).

I'm working on an online shop at the moment with Lou at Little Green Shed so hopefully you'll find more of my teatowels and canvas bags there soon...

spring is springing at last...

Having spent a happy couple of days at the allotment this week where everything is stirring (including the brambles) I thought I'd show you my 'Allotment' tea towel, photographed finally in the beautiful sunshine this afternoon - lets hope this year's veggies end up in such straight rows...