A Year in Silver Birch Crafts Life - 2011

One of my New Years Goals this year is to blog more! So I thought a great way to start is to tell you what has happened with Silver Birch Crafts over the past year.

January to March

Hopefully over the next few days I will be covering the year but Part 1 is January to March

So January arrived, very quickly, in itself it is not usually a very busy month business wise, but for Silver Birch Crafts started off the year with such a boost it was a shock! With 24 Sales in total, mostly because of the Yellow Spotty Bags which I had launched at the end of October. The very First Yellow Spotty Bag was done as a custom order for a very good friend of mine called Dannie who has a fantastic range of crocheted goodies over at Booties By Dannie who if it was not for Dannie I would never have made the bag let alone listed it on my website. Also in January I emailed a lovely lady called Louise who owns and runs Baby Signing Mummy to ask if she would review my Yellow Spotty Bag! She agreed and on the 13th January did this fantastic review of my Yellow Spotty Bag. So January ended up being a really fantastic month!

February arrived and with it the snow! The Yellow Spotty Bag sales continued and the thought was to widen the range. So after being emailed by a gentleman about a personalised spotty bag. I thought fantastic this will be a great addition and created a bag especially for "Zaki". I also designed and created the Yellow Spotty Gym Bag which is great for small things, I already had the range of Gym Bags and added this to it. By now I was making Spotty Bags by the batch, now when I say batch it doesn't mean that I was making huge batch's but small ones and taking care to make sure each and every Spotty Bag are unique. When making the bags the flap and under the flap are the same colour sequences, but the back and both sides are as different as I can make them. When putting the spots on I tend to "chuck" them on and see where they land!

When March arrived I wanted to develop the some of my other ranges further, so I added the Make Up Bags and Brush Rolls to my Website, these are a lovely little addition which I am hoping to develop further in 2012. The sales of Yellow Spotty Bag continued even though I thought they would slow down. During March I added the Toy Bag to the Yellow Spotty Range.

I hope you have enjoyed reading the first part of A Year In Silver Birch Crafts Life 2011 I will be covering April - June tomorrow!

Sarah

Creating a Sewing Room Part 6

Happy Easter Everyone!

Well the sewing room has been on a bit of a hold until i get the wood for the sewing table. But had a bit of a inspiration, there was a hook on my wall that used to house a picture, I needed somewhere to put odd bits of paper and notes!

So to tie in with the fabric in the room, i covered a cork board with a bit of the same fabric to create a functional but fun pin board.

As the original photos were done when it was dark outside, i thought i would take some more, to see the difference

It is so much brighter and airy in there that i really can't wait to get in!

Creating a Sewing Room Part 5

I wanted something simple at the window because it will also be a spare room, and its a very sunny room, i wanted it to be something that would block a bit of light out but not totally!

Next are the lovely cushions that will sit on my new sofabed, made with a remanant of the blind fabric

Close up

And placed next to the feature wall

Creating a Sewing Room Part 4

Well wallpapering time!! I was absolutely astounded to find this beautiful wallpaper at Homebase so perfect with its Silver Birch Trees.

Thank you to my husband for doing it, i brought 1 roll so there was not much room for error as you can see from the last photo which 1/2 a strip and 3 bits left over!

Next is the Roman Blind and cushions

Creating a Sewing Room Part 3

Ok after lots of coats of paint 4 to be exact! and 2 coats on the ceiling the room was looking so much nicer and brighter!

Next was to hang the wallpaper!

Creating a Sewing Room Part 2

Ok First things first was to get rid of the mint green walls!

This was the room after 1 coat of paint, looking so much better already!

I won't bore you with the 2nd and 3rd coats of paint! Next installment is after 4 coats of white paint and the ceiling having 2 coats of paint!

Creating a Sewing Room Part 1

I have been very quiet on here, been so busy with orders that i can not believe its nearly the end of April already!

I have been been keeping people up to date with the progress of my sewing room on Facebook, but thought i would do a progress on here.

So here goes, this is what the room looked like before i started.

Not very inspiring was it?