Older Posts, Page 8 of 14

Another manic week and another late post, apologies!

This week has been my first full week of my new schedule — a few weeks ago I had a wonderful childminder once a week who would take my two youngest children during school hours and I would get a frantic five hours of work done, guaranteed, without any distractions. I didn’t realise how important those five hours were until I lost them (she unfortunately is unable to cover my son’s nursery).

As we have had Easter & public holidays this has been my first, full week of attempting to adjust to a whole new routine which consists of my eldest at school, my middle son at nursery for just over two hours every afternoon (except a Friday where it’s the morning), my youngest wandering around totally lost as both his brothers are out of the house and Mum just doesn’t cut it in the "lets throw duplo all over the playroom then run away" stakes! In addition we have Toddlers, Jo Jingles, Football, Hip-Hop, Beavers and Judo to slot in there. Top that off with the huge daily task of managing the Jack Draws Anything, Jack Draws Anything (Facebook), email enquiries… — well, hopefully this goes a little way to explain why my Blog posts are so infrequent at the moment! (oh yeah, and house viewings as our house is on the market at the moment!)

Anyway, I survived the first week (just) and even managed to get a few orders out. A lovely Felt Box Frame was picked up on Thursday, I have delivered Name Banners and spent a lot of time again on the phone to Royal Mail attempting to discover where missing parcels are, unfortunately my business depends on Royal Mail and they are slowly but surely making sure that I don’t have a business to run with their poor parcel handling skills at the moment. Because of this, all postage is now going to be by Recorded Delivery now, but I will pop that in it’s own Blog post.

Back to the making pictures though — a few Name Banners have gone out but these are the ones I know have been received:

A very popular choice, the blue, red and white Star Banner.

A cream and yellow heart banner — this was for a friend who asked for a Name Banner that said Emily and left it up to me to decide which one and which colours.

And this one was a birthday gift for Toby’s friend Elena, who turned three a couple of weeks ago.

I’ve also dispatched quite a few hair clasp holders and hair clasps, and have uploaded to my Facebook page the pictures of my new Phone Cozys (again, I will do a separate Blog post for these!).

I have a few more Felt Box Frames to work on this week, plus an exciting commission for a Name Banner that I am really looking forward to making. It’s also Noah’s 2nd birthday next week, we have a Jo Jingles party and I have no idea what to put in party bags. I don’t even have the party bags yet! Aarrgghhh, so much to do!

Have a lovely weekend and I’ll see you all again next week with a picture of the Felt Box Frame.

Rose ×××

Wow — it’s been a very long time since I updated the blog, apologies for that.

Family wise, it’s been total chaos here with all of Jack’s fundraising efforts over on Jack Draws Anything, but that’s a post for another day! We've also had Noah back in hospital again, Toby starting nursery and a little trip to London to appear on the Fern show as well.

Not updating the Blog hasn’t meant that I have stopped making and taking orders — I have made numerous Name Banners and have quite a few email enquiries to get through over the course of this afternoon and this evening, then I can get on with a few more Blog posts and showing you what I have been making!

But before I do, I wanted to show you what I made the boys for Easter, with the help of a fantastic online tutorial over at Obsessively Stitching.

A set of Angry Birds! Having three boys, our house tends to be over-run with chocolate that lasts well into the summer, so I wanted to make them something that wouldn’t be rationed every day and that would last a lot longer than a chocolate egg, and these really have done the trick!

Not a day goes by where I’m not hit by an angry bird being thrown at something or other!

The only thing I would change in the pattern is stitching on the beaks and sticky up bits a bit more securely, as they get carried by whatever sticks out, as Toby is kindly demonstrating.

Even Noah has the hang of them — even though Toby and Noah have never played the game they still understood the concept of taking an angry bird and throwing it at whatever structure they had made out of Duplo or the contents of the Recycling box. The games they have came up with these are fantastic and just goes to prove that the most simple of toys are the best ones to play with.

Although when I say simple, making one certainly isn’t for the faint hearted — they took quite a bit of cutting out and pinning in order to get them just right. And don’t even get me started on how difficult the beaks were to attach.

Though when you see them all playing together and jointly making up structures, I don’t mind that my finger is still raw from shoving the needle through numerous layers of felt!

Thanks for taking the time to read, more Blog posts should be coming over the next few days including one about our adventures in London! Note, it will contain a lot of ranting about attempting to use the train to travel from London — Edinburgh on a Friday, really big mistake!

Apologies for the silence on here, Facebook, Twitter, email recently! Things are temporarily on hold for the moment, however a big announcement will be coming soon.

However, things have been fairly busy here despite me not working. My eldest son, Jack, asked if he could sell some of his pictures he draws to raise some money for the Sick Kids Friends Foundation. The Sick Kids hospital in Edinburgh has treated my youngest son since he was three months old for Bronchiolitis, he has had seven hospital visits in 20 months each requiring up to a weeks stay — so when Jack approached us and asked if he could help raise some money for them we were delighted.

The idea sort of snowballed from there — his Dad set him up a simple site and a JustGiving page — Jack Draws Anything (JustGiving) — and he set a target of £100. That was one week ago.

1 week on, and Jack’s fundraising idea has had coverage in The East Lothian Courier, The Edinburgh Evening News, The Big Issue, STV news, BBC Scotland news which then trickled onto BBC News 24 and BBC Breakfast on Saturday morning! His total now stands at £6,896.34 and his new target is £10,000.

The success of his site is phenomenal — we cannot comprehend the sheer volume of emails, tweets, Facebook messages and just giving donations. My week off has turned into one of the most chaotic weeks we have ever had, plus we put our house up for sale last week too!

So, if you haven’t already, please pop over to Jack Draws Anything and check out my very clever little boy’s website!

Just a quick post to let you know that Red and Rosy are now using Twitter. Please follow us at @redandrosyhq.

As we gain followers and spread the word we will be running some Twitter ONLY offers and promotions.

Give us a follow today and help spread the word, thank you.

Good afternoon, and what a beautiful sunny afternoon it is here in East Lothian! It is so lovely in fact, that my children and I had a little picnic in the back garden for lunch, and we didn’t even need coats! (to be fair, the back garden is South facing and a sun trap so it does tend to be much warmer than out the front.).

It was a fantastic weekend, I am just about up to date with all of my orders and I managed to get some work done on a few ideas for new products to take along to fairs (my first one of 2011 is Saturday — eek!). Plus, I took some stock along to Sweet Treat which is based in Tranent (122a High Street to be exact!) which was very exciting.

In addition to the usual batch of Name Banners, I was asked to make one of the Name Banners with individual letters — this time in pink with strawberries at either end. I was more than happy to oblige!

I’ve had that strawberry ribbon sitting in my ribbon box for months now, and I have never quite found the right project to use it with — I have now! The letters in these are 4½ inches tall (so quite a bit bigger than my other banners) which makes the length of the banner longer too.

These are priced £12 for up to four letters (£2 for each additional letter) until the 28th February 2011. I will be having a complete price re-structure on the 1st March and these will be considerably more expensive because of the amount of time put into making each one.

On with preparing more stock for the weekend, have a lovely, sunny day wherever you are.