Well, it's been one hell of a year so far! You may have seen my mum and I at a small handful of events around Manchester, dipping toes into the waters of markets and events. Honestly, it's been amazing.
Out and About
Working as a sole-trader artist selling my items primarily online is an interesting lifestyle. Often feedback is silent and the accessories, creatures and non-edible goods that I make land in their new homes quietly. Visiting the markets has been a fantastic experience as it's allowed me to meet so many of you face-to-face and see your eyes light up as you exclaim "oh my god! it's a bag?!". It has brought such joy to this little studio and immense pride in my work.
Also, being able to bring the workshop table to Bents Garden Centre and The Coronation Weekend was brilliant and we had huge amounts of fun making a ridiculous amount of keyrings (I still can't believe we actually sold out!)
New Collections
You may have seen the newest bag launch, this follows on from the handful of bakery themed bags I created last year and brings it together as a full collection. I'm immensely proud of this weird little bunch of bags, and the sweets bag has been an ongoing project since January 2020!
Coming next, we have a mini-drop of halloween pumpkin bags and a LOTR hobbit door bag, because...well why not? After these, the next big collection will be... Cartoon and 90s Nostalgia. The designs are already completed and I have some really cool ideas that I don't think you'll have seen before. This may be split up into a 90s collection and then a mini-drop of the non-90s designs including Adventure Time and Spongebob, but I'll see how I feel as that progresses.
Commissions
I've had an astonishing amount of commissions this year, hence the quiet for the past few months! It's been a bit of a wild ride and I'm just about to officially pack and ship off the last two in the coming week. I have absolutely loads to share but no time to post recently, so as I wind down I can kick up the blog and get to posting some of the really cool makes I've been up to!
Commissions are currently available for quotes, but order books won't open until this batch is officially completed. I like to completely empty my workbench at this time of year of big projects as a bit of a reset for Christmas bookings to ensure there is no backlog and everyone can have their orders for December!
Leatherworking Tutorials
A while ago, I wanted to create more video tutorial content. This is something I've enjoyed doing but never had the time. This year I decided to give it a shot and started a youtube channel whilst filming my first part of the series which will be the Cherry Blossom Pochette. Editing however, takes a lot longer than anyone would have you believe and I'm aiming for the videos to be 20-30 minutes in length showing you all the steps in a way where you can either follow along or just watch casually, so currently I'm making slow progress learning about framing and sound. However you can watch the intro to the first video here:
What's Else is New?
This year I've released brand new courses including sneaker making and sandal courses. They've gone down a storm! We've also welcomed a large number of people onto the dice bag class which has been fantastic and I've really loved teaching them. A new feature I'll be putting out soon is exactly that, a feature! Every so often I'll be running a student feature showing their amazing projects and what they made. You can already follow some of these on Instagram, but I want to really show off the incredible work that students are making in the studio because it really is fantastic!!
Speaking of Dice Bags, I have four very special beings waiting to drop onto the website in the coming mini-drop. These are a slightly different style than the previous drops and I'm quite excited for this batch!
For today, I'm going to leave it here! There's been plenty going on behind the doors and I'm excited to share things with you in more detail regularly via this blog. I've also enlisted my earlier mentioned mum to write some posts and keep you all updated when I'm busy crafting, so please make sure to give her a lot of support - she also runs the facebook page if you want to say hi!
The next few months should really be a lot of fun so fingers crossed my fantastical coming ideas are just as fantastic as I think they are!!
