The most stressful day

I am posting this image of a lovely calming hydrangea heart to compensate for having the MOST STRESSFUL DAY.

This morning was fine - not really my sort of thing but there you go. Katie wanted to spend her holiday money - £13.68 - so we went into Glasgow and she went into a frenzy in Claire's Accessories where they had a special deal where you could get10 sale items for £5.

We now have a very happy 6 year old with lots of glittery bits in her hair.

Then I got back here to find that the buttons on my website were not all working properly - aaaarggggh - lots of individual orders instead of nicely grouped ones. I emailed everyone to confirm their orders and refund their multiple postages and thought "Aha, it is a problem with the shopping baskets - I can fix that"

So I redid all the shopping basket buttons on the website, very tedious work, - loaded it all up and found that now NOTHING worked.

Hmmmm. I was not a happy bunny. I ate a lot of chocolate (73% cocoa - allowed), I stomped around, I phoned the Stirling Enterprise IT man (who was out). In the end it turned out that I had bookmarked paypal and they had subsequently changed their site so none of my buttons matched their baskets. Therefore nothing connected and you just got error messages.

Now I have redone it all again and it looks to be working. I think. Of course I have managed to b****r up all the spacing on the pages in my panic but that is for another day. I have put a note up about contacting me if anything doesn't work.

See pride comes before a fall. How professional I must look.

I am now off to pack up these baskets and calm down so that they can be sent off with love! After the postal strike that is.

Country Living

Hoooo! Woooo! as my youngest would say.
2 posts in one day.
The excuse is my Country Living magazine dropped through the door and there we are - one of our painted handle baskets in the Emporium section!

Daisy doll - Mark 63

When the girls were younger we had a book of miscellaneous bedtime tales - my favourite was a one called Ruby. I can't remember the author but the story was about the adventures of some toys - led by the eponymous Ruby - who escaped from the reject bin at the toy factory and eventually found happiness by being adopted by a little girl.

They were obviously paying attention to their bedtime stories as the girls' bedrooms are now full of mutanty dolls - scooped from MY reject bin. Dolls with fat heads, dolls with thin heads, dolls with backwards shoes, dolls with felt hair (that did NOT work), dolls whose faces turned out to be really really scary.

I am amazed that I have actually persevered with this - I am not patient by nature - but here we have The Finished Daisy Doll.

Her body is made from vintage French linen and wool gingham with vintage ticking shoes; her titian locks are the jute string I use to bind my sweet peas; her reversible dress is a Liberty print with gingham as the alternative.


My idea with the dolls was to, as I have mentioned in the comments to my last post, make something that could be customised, either as a bridesmaid present or just a really nice present to a little girl. I could match hair colour and style (within reason), eye colour, perhaps even a favourite dress. I would love to have a go at making one as a copy of a bridesmaid's dress.

I do like this red headed girl though - very Scottish - I would have loved long wavy red hair.

She has been sitting in the shop today and has received lots of lovely complements (just look at her blushing) - I need to work out timings and costings before she can go on sale.

Repeating the pattern?

When I was growing up my Mum, like many women tried to find piece work that would fit in with being at home after school and in the holidays - she did B&B, she painted pegs to look like soldiers and highland dancers, she helped organise play schemes but most consistently she made toys for a local craft shop.

My clearest memories of Mum before she took up antique dealing are of her sitting each evening in front of the wood burner with a willow basket full of half made animals waiting to be hand finished.

Recently I have been drawn to making toys again - and I am looking back to patterns from the 60s and 70s, probably quite similar in style to the patterns copied from magazines in my youth. This cute pony is my favourite at the moment - made in soft suede effect fabric with felt mane and tail he is just the right size and squashiness for a small hand.

I wonder whether this is a form of broodiness - my girls are growing up fast and are not as attached to soft toys any more (though they pleaded for, and got, all my prototypes for the toys I am working on at the moment). I don't intend to have another baby - perhaps this sewing soft things is a displacement activity (though if you ask me professionally I will spout that I want to develop a children's section for the website)

Updating the website

This afternoon has been drizzly so I have finally put down my hoe and got around to updating some things on the website. I have put up a few more of my Mum's ever popular chicken paintings - these cost about £2.00 to pack and post, and they are ideal for chicken lovers. She is busy working on paintings for a series of exhibitions in East Lothian so I suspect that these are going to be all I can manage to prise of her for the next month or so.

This photo is of Treela, an Isla Brown and our cheekiest chicken. Today I found her in our bathroom, perched on the side of the bath. Neither cats no dogs bother her at all when she is in the house.

I also finished the felted/embroidered cushions and put together some kits.

I have loved making these cushions - they are the ideal work to do in the evenings either outside watching the sunset or inside watching the t.v. The cushions have turned out even better than I thought they would - I was determined not to produce anything that looked like anybody else's, I wanted to make something that looked vintage but not derivative. I hope that I have succeeded. I am not going to be able to produce many though so they are strictly limited editions.

Mini gingham hearts

The motivating idea of Snapdragon the business is that customers should go away with more than they expected. At the van this usually means a few extra flowers to make up a bedside posy or some gardening advice, it might be the loan of a vase or some fresh herbs. It is what sets us apart from the supermarket and keeps out customers coming back.

I want this to continue when we move into mail order and am working on a number of small - low materials cost - things that can be added into parcels. This mini gingham heart is one of them - made from the scraps of wool gingham left when I am making the wheatbags with a backing of antique linen it is something that can be sewn up while watchbing television.

It is filled with our dried rosemary mixed with wheat scented with maychang a nice citrusy smell. I wanted something that wasn't lavender as many people hang these in their car instead of a magic tree. I don't want them lulled off to sleep.

I didn't expect it to be so small. . .

That is usually my reaction to things that I buy by mail order. I know that measurements are always included and it is my fault but everything somehow seems a bit more skimpy in my house than it did in the photos.

I have been thinking about this today as it was one of my web sessions this afternoon and I spent it installing the paypall buttons on the site. Suddenly it looked real.

I haven't made the site live yet as there are doubtless typos and formats to be sorted out but technically I could run it via the web and buy things myself. (My life isn't quite dull enough for that yet - I love receiving parcels but posting them to myself might be going a bit far) Day for lift off will be March 5th.

I am - as the title of this entry suggests- rather worried about mail order. I am used to people handing the things they buy, personally choosing everything. I chat to them about what will suit them best.

Everyone who has bought from me via the web, having seen things on the blog and then e-mailed me, has given me lovely feedback. For which I am very grateful. I shall have to get used to selling without seeing the whites of the customers eyes.

The red and white handles in the photo are from some french style wire baskets that I have been painting. The baskets are a lovely shape and very useful for everything from vegetable collecting to loo roll storage, but the handles are a matt brown and make the whole thing look rather dull. I copied this red and white design from the swimsuit of a 1920s lady in a painting of Deauville. I've also done a more subtle duck egg blue version.

Dahlia suppliers

Gillian asked me about reliable suppliers of dahlia tubers as she had bought a tuber from e-bay which was meant to be dark red but it had bloomed yellow.

It is always frustrating when that happens and it is NEVER something nicer than you had been expecting, always something in salmony orange or chrome yellow.

The problem is that all suppliers tend to buy at auction - they are bidding on lots which look more or less the same in their dormant state - so they are only as good as the word of the auctioneer and the growers .

As soon as a variety becomes oversubscribed there is a temptation to pass off other varieties as it - after all the customer won't know until it flowers and by then they may have forgotten where they bought it.

I buy in quantity direct from Holland and the firm that I deal with have so far been superb both in quality and in reliability. They don't speak English that well & I don't speak Dutch so I rely on a Dutch friend if I need to find out any fine details. They only sell wholesale though which is no use if you just want a couple of tubers.

In the past I have bought dahlias from Sarah Raven's Cutting Garden - her prices are high but so is the quality (I suspect we share a supplier!). I believe that her dahlia list will be out soon.

I do sell dahlias here at the van - but at the moment don't officially mail order them, though I would be quite happy to post them out. The varieties I am getting are 3 dark flowered ones - Rip City;Black Cat; and Choc and some fabulous Karma dahlias -bred as cut flowers with long vase life, good strong stems and vibrant colours - in pink and red. They will be available from March.