Beauties and the Beast

Just a few beauties from the Great Yorkshire Show last week - I thought I'd focus mainly on goats here as there were plenty of lovely sheep for you from the Royal Norfolk Show last month. 
Goats - I really rather fell in love with them, but only had a very short time to admire them. That's the downside of doing shows on your own - just not enough time to look around.

Just a few shots of wash and brush up before the day begins:

And a little walk to stretch the legs:

And if all the goats were the beauties from this show, then this has to be The Beast - ugly pig!!

Finally, in case you thought I'd abandonned my love of all things woolly, here is a rather lovely teddy bear of a sheep:

some of the caged prize winning fleeces: 

and a rather splendid chair:

Our Handmade Calendar's History

I'm just starting on next year's handmade calendar and, not wanting to duplicate ideas from previous years, had a quick look through the back issues. 
Originally I thought a handmade calendar would be a fabulous way to welcome in the new millenium, so the year 2000 was going to be my year of the calendar. Just one year.
Oh no, customers thought otherwise and here I am planning the 16th one. I'm actually quite proud of the achievement.
Here they all are, all 15 to date: 

 This is the cover of the first issue - very simple, no woolly sheep until you get inside. 

And this is how you would have welcomed in the new millenium - 3 woolly sheep in the hills. The weekends were greyed out to help see your way through each month - should I do that again? Not sure, so your feedback would be most welcome.

The following years I played around with different layouts and fonts:

Originally the images were all black, the only colour being the added fleece. I then decided I'd hand colour a few of the images, just to liven things up a little. Here is February 2009, the year of the cow - a brown Jersey cow:

As the calendars grew in popularity, I decided to get them digitally printed as it was really a labour of love to hand colour each and every calendar. I could then include more detailed drawings with more intricate colouring such as this Ford tractor for September 2012:

I've always liked a very pale yellow background for my work and the calendars have fallen in line with this. Until this year the printers and I chose a pale yellow paper stock, but this year we decided to run with white stock and print the pale yellow along with the images. I think it's worked well, and I've not had anyone let me know they're unhappy. It keeps the costs down and the RRP at an affordable level, so this is what we will continue to do.

Our biggest decision, always, is how many to print. I never know and we ran out of stock last year... It will never be very many as they are time consuming to make. 
I do have several customers who have been loyal since 2000 and have bought one, two, three or more every year. I love these customers, and you know who you are!

So if you want to get your hands on a copy for 2015, you need to be signing up for our newsletter (the link to do this is on our home page) where you will be offered them first (and at a special price)

In the meantime, I need to go out and look for some inspiration for the images. What would you like to see, and for which month? It'd be great if you could let me know in the comments below

A Little Needle Felting Goes a Long Way

At the shows I'm often asked "What's it made out of?" Well, I use sheep's fleece, but in very small quantities, so this year I thought I'd take some fleece along with me. A splash of colour in the corners, I thought. 

I cut a large sack to size and then loosely stitched some of my dyed sheep's fleece to it. I'm not a great stitcher, so this was a tad tedious for me

The first dyed fleece stitched to the sack:

This shows my beautiful stitching!:

As I stitched on more blocks of fleece, you can see the gaps: 

And you can see that I had a little "help" from a certain rescue Staffie/lurcher (Coota by name): 

I needed a bit more rigidity to the whole sack thing, so took a little trip to the local garden centre for some of this:

Once all the fleece was added to the sack, I then needed to attach the whole piece to it's plastic backing and fill in the gaps.

I roughly stitched it all in place 

This is where the needle felting came in. I lay the sack of fleece over the plastic trellis stuff and needle felted it all together - very loosely as I didn't want to loose the fleece look, with all the locks of wool

And then the completed piece was tried, and approved, by the aforementioned dog

Here's the finished work, ready to take to the show:

I was on a needle felting roll now, and had found this plastic plant support at the garden centre.

I felted some undyed fleece to both rings, changed the plastic legs for dowels and had a relatively weird display for my handmade paper gift bags

Simple, inexpensive and environmentally quite green. And, not heavy to transport!

The Country Living Spring Fair that I missed :(

I love helping out at these bigger retail shows – there’s so many new people to meet, and so many new beautiful products to look at. In previous years, I have been known to slip away from the stand for an hour and get my Christmas shopping done early (very organised!). 

But living out here in Taiwan means I had to miss it this year – I was very sad!

In case you missed our stand, here is how it looked this spring:

Note the splash of colour down the corner - Mum stitched (yes, she actually got out a needle and thread!) and loosely needle felted 2 runners, one for each corner - it adds interest and colour and helps to show that she uses sheep's wool in all her work.

Mum told me all about the new products she saw while she was exploring the show. Even though I’m living somewhere rather warm, I was sad to miss these gorgeous alpaca wool throws and blankets from So Cosy. 

We seem to have a bit of a thing for alpacas here at Penny Lindop Designs;  our cards and notecards have been very popular! 

I would have loved to have seen more work from Heidi Rhodes. 

Both my sister Nicola and I have special pieces from her, mine showing my graduation ceremony (I went to Birmingham uni), and Nicola’s shows her completion of the Duke of Edinburgh award. They are totally unique, and we both love them! 

Mum also showed me pictures of these beautiful Mosaic table tops by Helen Baron, who read archaeology at Newcastle university and then went on to work on mosaic restoration. Mum read archaeology at Birmingham uni so it was funny that they were side by side at the show!  Obviously Mum’s favourite was this cute sheep one. I think it would look great on the patio outside her log cabin! 

While all these products are amazing, and there were so many more to choose from, I think the thing I’m most upset about missing is……the two adorable 9 day old lambs!

Did you go to the show? What were your favourite things? 

Post by Emma, in Taiwan

A Gentle Border Walk

I thought I'd take you for a gentle walk today with Coota; he's our rescue staffie/lurcher cross who's been with us now for 7 months. I think he's doing really well, and to be honest, I think we're doing pretty well too since we've never had anything like him before. He's nothing like a collie! 

So let's grab the lead and whistle and set off on our walk.....today I'm taking you to Broomscot Common on the Norfolk/Suffolk borders. It's part of a community conservation project, so it's lovely to have it on the doorstep and we love it there. A very therapeutic place, and good for inspiration.

 

To get to the common we walk across the village playing field and have a quick belt round with a ball

The common itself is fenced off, so perfect for a sight hound.

It has one area that is really quite boggy, and therefore not visited by Coota who doesn't really do watery things

Around one side there is gorse and small trees and under foot it's all tussocky and lovely

Sheep graze here for some parts of the year, but weren't here on this walk, but here's the sheep's fleece evidence in the trees:

The middle area is empty of trees and perfect for chasing rabbits. 

The rabbits are an important part of the project as they, and the sheep, keep down some of the vegetation which allows this beautiful mossy carpet to grow (Sorry, Coota just doesn't understand the concept of lying on the ground with a camera!)

I find this common particularly good for letting thoughts sought themselves out in my mind. It's when I get inspiration that seems to come from nowhere - the ideas for new card designs or a month on the calendar come in when some of the other stuff is allowed out. I can relax as I know Coota cannot run off, so it's a happy place, whatever the weather. 

And then home, via the playing field again for another burst of energy, chasing the ball.