Button giveaway

I have this box of buttons. What I call boring buttons- browns and black and whites and standard looking things, but useful nevertheless. The box is 4 inches square and 2.5 inches deep and it’s pretty much full.

 

Do you want it?

If so you have a week (so until midday GMT on Friday 23rd March 2012) to leave a comment on this post guessing how many buttons are in the box. I will then count and the closest guess will win! One entry per person please 🙂

Also, if you like buttons, look out for issue 3 of Crafteroo magazine out on 1st April. Not only will I have a tutorial on making a book with giant buttons as seen on the cover…

… but also I have a tutorial on how to make pretty buttons- I have made glittery and these animal ones and will tell you how I did it!

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Button swap – and other stuff

It’s been confirmed that Amiee has received my package so I can now blog what I sent in the Crafteroo button swap!

I made my very first book. It was fine up until the point where the cover wouldn’t take the impression of the buttons underneath particularly well so I added a load more glue. And then the glue got all the other pages a bit damp and I had to iron them with kitchen roll between each leaf. Twice. Anyway I’m pretty happy with my first attempt at bookbinding 🙂

I also sent her some (pretty badly) covered buttons, some wooden buttons I love that I stitched onto scrapbooking paper and stamped with whatever stamps were in my desk at the time, and also a box of trufflepiglet chocs- most of which were champagne truffles with little buttons on top! I originally made red buttons with popping candy inside, but the damn things did not like being demoulded!

In other news, I have started on a farmyard quilt for OH’s baby half-brother’s first birthday next month. Here’s the first block of eight. This means I have two patchwork projects on the go at once which can only end badly :S

Also I had a fight with a bowed Billy bookcase and put the back on sideways, sawed off the excess (taking the end of my thumb off in the process) and getting OH to drive in some screws to stop the damn thing collapsing again. Oh and before then I glued on some Ikea goat-based fabric I liked but was too big for my usual uses with bookbinding glue. That worked a treat! Anyway this bookcase can actually hold the weight of books now. Who’d have thought it?! Try and collapse your way out of that, Billy boy!

Also my last day working on the magazine is tomorrow! I decided to go back to a 9-5 job so that when I’m at home the time is MINE, and also so I can do crafty things again without feeling like I don’t really want to. It’s really nice making your hobby into a job, but when you have to deliver projects all the time and so many of them, you really lose the drive to do anything for yourself! This was the problem with PennyDog, which is why I’m streamlining (again!) and changing the way it works later this year. So I am crocheting and quilting and bookbinding, all the stuff I wanted to do but never had the time to. It’s nice 🙂

Have I ever mentioned my supplies shop?

You’ll be glad to hear I have another resin tutorial coming up this week, I’m really getting my act together now. However this weekend I have been rather poorly, which has given me an opportunity to get some more stuff listed in my Folksy supplies shop that has been waiting around forever. I set it up several months back now selling button, ribbons and unusual jewellery findings and any stuff I thought people might find cute and unusual to use in their own craft work. This is quite fun as I can buy all those things when I go to the wholesaler that I don’t actually need, or pick up some extra vintage bargains at the market!

Anyway, here’s a few bits I have in stock to show the range of stuff I have, apologies for the massive advert in this update 😉

Snazzy

I’m working on some projects for a book proposal and I made these cufflinks with a teeny amount of resin and some plain shank buttons- really pleased with them!

Buttons and boot bracelets

I’ve started putting my glittery buttons online. The colours are a bit limited, but the range will expand over the next couple of weeks! Both shank buttons and buttons with holes are available.

I’m also working on some boot bracelets to slip over wool boots such as Ugg boots, but also Cowboy boots. They are often worn by line dancers, but toning down the bling a bit makes them suitable for everyday wear! This is my first prototype (to be worn one per boot), and I hope to get them in my shop soon whilst we’re still wrapping up warm, I just need to find a more hardwearing chain!

Custom order finished… and some other stuff

Firstly- and most importantly- I need to let you all know that the price of the moulds in my shop will all be going up 50p on 1st January because of changing exchange rates and customs charges. But the good news is that for the whole of January you can get 15% off everything (moulds/jewellery/homewares…) in my January sale with the code “jansale09”. I hope that makes up for it!

I thought I’d show you a custom order I made for Chelsea on Etsy. It’s a full size king chess piece made from pearlescent powder and blue resin, cut in half with text applied and a bail attached. The idea was for it to be a good luck pendant for Eric’s chess tournament, but I think the King piece is a little on the large size at 12cm, so it will possibly be used as some other kind of ornament.

In other news I have started making resin buttons, but not a clue on how to price them! Do you think 80p-£1 each (depending on size and shank vs holes) is too much?

Also you can see Fletcher is back to normal after his ordeal- he interrupted my photo session as it was what we like to call “Fletcher-time” where he gets upset if you do not devote 100% of your attention to him! He does still look a bit spaced in the pic but it was the angle I took it on, saying that he looks dopey most of the time to be fair!

Make 50: Week 32

I finished my soap dish, and with SoapyChica’s soap contribution (www.soapychica.co.uk) made a gift box 🙂

Replicas

I’m quite pleased with how this has worked out. On the left are the buttons I use on my knitting needles with the shank cut off, though I can’t get these anywhere anymore! So what I did was create a mould from the buttons with silicone. I used gelcoat for the brown middle first so that it didn’t run everywhere, then the next morning topped it up with yellow resin and ta da!

Make 50: Week 15 and 16

Since I fell a little behind with my makes, here is last week’s and this week’s together in a single blog post 🙂

Week 15 saw me making a heck of a lot of wool flowers, then wrapping the stems with floral tape… A bit different for me, but there again so were the sock zombies 🙂

And then this week I have been making samples for Kathleen and Lily’s, they wanted some brooches as their shop has a vintage theme, and I thought the resin piece was a bit bland on it’s own so I jujed (is that how Gok would spell it?) it up a little. Sending it to them today, I hope it is approved! Let me know if you think I should make some of these for my website, do you like them?

Interview with… Hollingdale Designs

 

I have bought lots of Gill’s buttons recently as she started making them for the Comic Relief shop and hasn’t looked back- they’re great for my newly launched Starburst Stackers as well as knitting needle ends. Primarily though, she is a glass artist and makes beautiful fused bowls and plates as well as lampwork beads.

 

Who are you and where do you come from?
I’m Gill Harrison (nee Hollingdale) and I was born in Essex but now live in Scotland with my husband and my dog Sadie.

What do you do in your spare time other than craft?
Well I do seem to spend a lot of time on crafting!  If I need a change from glass I will get out the polymer clay or make some jewellery. We do try and get out walking with Sadie most days, we have some great walks locally. I also love watching films and going to the cinema.

Please tell us a little bit about what you make.
Well just over 2 years ago I  started making lampwork glass beads which involves melting glass rods in a torch and wrapping the glass around a metal rod called a mandrel. The bead then has to go into a kiln to anneal. Having bought a kiln for the beads I then began experimenting with fusing glass too. This is where pieces of glass are cut from sheet glass, put together into the required shape and then put into the kiln to fuse together. A lot of my recent fusing work has been done using thin strips of glass which are put together with the strips on their sides. With the larger items that I make they can go through a fusing cycle several times before they are complete, the last time is the slump to shape them

What do you enjoy making most?
Well I really wish I could split myself in two and be able to fuse and lampwork at the same time as I enjoy doing both. I really like the fact that when I am sitting making beads I have to concentrate so much on the bead I can forget everything else but then with fusing there is that special moment when you open the kiln to see what’s inside…  I prefer making larger fused things like bowls or the clocks I made recently rather than pendants.

What part do you dislike the most?
Got to be the bead cleaning! Especially after a productive session when there can be 20 to 30 beads to clean. They do look good when they are all cleaned up though. With fusing it’s cleaning again really as all the glass has to be washed to remove dust, greasy marks or cutting oil before going into the kiln. This would be alot easier if I had a sink in my workshop though.

What are your main inspirations for making a piece?
I think this has to be colour, I love all the colours of glass that are available now. I enjoy putting the colours together in patterns or using colours to make, for example, flowers in encased floral beads. I am influenced by nature and seasons too but its colour combinations that I enjoy experimenting with the most.

Do you plan out your designs or do you get stuck in straight away when inspiration strikes?
With lampwork I will often sit at the torch and see how the glass takes me…but with fusing I often start out with a sketch of what I want to make. However, the sketch I start with and the finished product are often very different, usually because I will adapt and add to the original idea as I go along.

What are you currently making?
I recently finished a large fusing project which took me a couple of weeks to make so at the moment I am enjoying doing some slightly less complicated things. Trying to get into a routine of lampworking in the mornings and fusing in the afternoons. I just took a slumped glass bowl out of the kiln this morning.

Do you make custom orders?
Hmm, well I have done but I’m not good at it! I worry too much about making exactly what the customer asked for and this sort of stifles the creativity. Also, almost everything I make is a one-off original piece so I don’t like to make things that are too similar to things I have made in the past.

Where can we buy your work?
I have a shop on my website http://www.hollingdaledesigns.com
and I also have a shop on Etsy http://hollingdaledesigns.etsy.com

For Gill’s buttons, go to http://HollingdaleDesigns.folksy.com