Happy Halloween! I love halloween so much! This is the costume I'll be wearing tonight. I made it last year to go to a fancy dress wedding. But I figure since it took about a week to make I can totally get away with wearing it again. I have my fingers crossed for the costume competition, but the pub I'm going to takes their costume making VERY seriously, so I think I'll be one of many hopefuls.
I went to the Craft Ireland Etsy Team meeting today in Dublin. It was a bit of a long trip but I was able to fit in a visit with my parents and the meeting was great. I met up with Tanya, Alex, and Sarah. It was really good to find out more about the team, show some of my products and volunteer to help out with the teams blog. I don't think I'll be able to to to the monthly meeting, but every couple of months should be easy enough to manage.
I've been a busy little bee trying to get my new designs done for my pocket mirrors. It was this time last year that I put in my big order and they sold like hot cakes over the Christmas season, I suppose people thought they were good stocking fillers. I have decided to move away from the designs using models faces as they don't sell as well, so I've gone for the more pop/kitsch stuff, which is always lots of fun to design. I've kept about 10 of the old designs and added 35 new ones. I was a lot of work to get this all done, but a wide variety will mean they will sell faster. I ordered a total of 500, and 200 large badges with the same designs. I found when I was selling the mirrors some people were very disappointed that they weren't badges, so hopefully these will sell well too.
As some of you may already know I'm an out and proud geek. Yes I am the kind of girl who plays scrabble for fun, does crosswords, waches Star Trek, reads fantasy novels, watches horror movies, and loves to sit down to watch a good documentary. So it may be no surprise to you then to hear that I was very excited last night when we won a table quiz. My two loves rolled up together, smart things and pints...woohoo.
The other nice part about the trip was that I got to go to Galway,which I hadn't visited in 10 years, which is totally crazy because it's only 2hrs on the bus and it's a great city. It was totally buzzing with people when I arrived, buskers every 10 meters, a tonnes of shoppers in the city centre. I went to their market, which is great and has a wide variety of stalls. It is a bit crazy that it's in a tiny alley way and they stall are very small, it would drive me crazy as a trader. It did put me off queueing for food as I'm not a huge fan of getting stuck in crowds. I wish I would have had money on me, there were definitely a few things I would have snatched up. When I enquired at a few stalls if they sold stuff online I was surprised when most of them said no. It's so easy these days to set it up, it seems like such a wasted opportunity not to. There is one shop I totally fell in love with Lola Rosa, if ever there was a shop that I wanted to buy every single thing in it, it was this one!! It's like crawling inside someones brain who is dotty, arty, clolourful and they have a long shopping list of presents to get through. They sells lots of beautiful things that would be perfect for gifts, but also a selection of fabrics,ribbons, and buttons. Really I can't recommend this shop highly enough, and if you can't make it to Galway check out their website! 
I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to Dublin on a secret mission, and I think it's safe now to reveal the lastest Nice Day Designs developments. I was talking to Dee from Lucy's Lounge about two months back and she said she was interested in stocking my clothes. For any of you who don't know where this gem of a shop is, it's a wonderful treasure trove of vintage in the basement of SeSi in the heart of Temple Bar in Dublin. So I went up two weeks ago to work out the finer point of this and I am currently working on 10 pieces for the shop. I'm so excited, SeSi is a shop I have loved and adored since my early teenage years, and to be selling in Temple Bar it a great new opportunity for me. I think the people who shop there will be far more open to my more outlandish designs, and it's a great chance to let the wilder side of my designs flow.
Well it was bound to happen eventually, my little sewing machine eventually died. There have been lots of small problems with it for ages but it eventually gave up the ghost last night. Unfortuneately it's not the best timing in the world to be paying for repairs, but to be honest I'm surprised it lasted this long with the amount of work I do on it. Luckily my lovely friend Sharon lent me hers for a little bit so I won't have to stop working.
