Etsy

I've been awful with this Etsy lark. Haven't updated in ages, so I've just re-activated a few items. I shall think of something new to make and sell soon, I hope! Click here to go to the shop or use the sidebar on the left.

new stuff in the shop this week

I've just listed this little lamb in the shop. I am so in love with the damned thing that I don't want to let him go, but I promised the husband that I'd not keep any more of my toys. The lamb is what I was photographing half-finished the week before last - I finished it ages ago but the light has been so poor that it has taken me until today to take pictures of it. The weather has been truly appalling recently. And we lost our internet here for a few days too, which didn't help things.

I shall also be listing two much larger lambs later on this week, and soon, this birdhouse clock that I started yesterday:




Sorry for my absence last week - with no internet and quite a bit of work to do, I kind of let things slip...

Things afoot

I have a few things in the pipeline here for the shop. A few new friends will be appearing there next week, I hope. The weather here has been dreary, and in a house that already lacks light, finding an opportunity to photograph products in natural light is difficult to say the least.


Instead of working today, I got distracted with this project (above). Can you guess what it is? I have since finished it, but you'll have to wait until next week before I show you how it turned out. Photographed in very unnatural light on top of my Wacom tablet. deary me. I worked on and off on my sewing today until my agent called and asked me to trace some of Alison Carmichael's beautiful hand-rendered type into Flash (at least I believe it was hers!). Check out her amazing work if you haven't ever heard of her - but for sure you will have seen her work before in the UK for such big names as Cadbury's, Sainsbury's, Aero, Hellman's and today, Douwe Egberts... I felt like I was riding roughshod all over her careful work with my tracing. The image below is one of my favourites (from the Creative Review website).

grumpy bunny

I'm feeling a bit like this little dude today. A bit down in the dumps. I feel like I'm still asleep even though I've been at my desk for two hours. I've been working pretty hard on this new animation project for the last few days, so haven't had time to play as much as I'd like :-) My stuffing arrived the day after I ordered it, so whilst I've had the materials for making toys, I've not had the time. The stuffing (all 6 kilos of it) is currently sitting in a huge box in the middle of the sitting room like, as Mark calls it, a carbuncle. I think I'd better deal with it before he gets annoyed! If it were his stuff, I'd have made him put it away days ago! I can be such a hypocrite...

a jaundiced lamb?

Well, as promised here's my prototype lamb. I would say she's the most 'proper' toy I've made yet, because she's actually based on the skeletal configuration of a real sheep and doesn't have silly eyes like most of my toys have had so far. I'm not so sure that she's particularly 'me' if that makes sense - I think maybe she should have the silly eyes and that would make her a Karen Cheung toy. Or something else - she's sweet, but probably not mad enough for me. And she's yellow because that's the fabric I have in the largest quantity and that I'm not likely to use other than for making smiley lemons :-) I'll work on it...

Alas, I've run out of stuffing, so friend-making will be put aside for a few days. Plus I got an animation job! I'm struggling horribly with ideas for that at the moment - you know, how clients so often want something so different from what I'd like to do, and usually something so CHEESY that I want to weep into my sketchbook. I digress. More on that project another time.

two new friends

I've been away for a few days. Not been up to much except seeing family up in Birmingham, where my sister and I went to the market and bought lots of very cheap but lovely fabric from which I've made two new friends. The first one is a cat for Jelly's stand at the Creative Review Portfolio Exhibition in June. I'm going to make him a little Jelly sweater to wear. He likes to eat Oriental instant noodles with fried egg like me, only they won't give him heart disease... I haven't given him a name yet. Maybe the folks at Jelly will christen him in June.

The second little fella is a glove puppet I made at the weekend. He is a sports-mad gym bunny and likes to do sit-ups. I haven't quite perfected the art of making puppets that fit properly yet, but I can just about get my hand into him for some good sit-up action.