Origin - the London Craft Fair

For years I have visited the chelsea craft fair - run by the crafts council. Chelsea craft fair became Origin last year, and the location has changed but the fair is just as good. If you check out the link you can see a little sneak peak of who is exhibiting this year. I have picked out a couple that I am looking forward to seeing this time (below). The fair runs for 2 weeks and they change exhibitors after the first week. This year it runs from the 2nd-14th October.
I've not been particularly productive over the last week. I've done a few drawings of new monsters I'd like to create and made a stack of cards to sell at work and of course Stevie is keeping me pretty busy - I'm scratched to death, and I fear for me feet if I need to go to the toilet in the night (I swear she waits up to attack them) but she's lovely, and does so much cute stuff, like falling asleep in the box that our new router came in. ahh.

It's all about the cats

I don't have any of my own crafty offerings at the moment, but I was very lucky to be sent this cheeky little kitty from Gila at Strumpfkunst for being her 100th etsy heart I can spend hours trawling around etsy finding lots of things to add to my favourites. I do occasionally buy stuff too.
I wonder if Gila secretly knew about the arrival of my little baby kitten Stevie?
Stevie is so playful and full of energy one minute and completely zonked out the next minute. Yesterday I was doing my best to work from home but stevie just kept climbing on me or on the desk to see me. She's sitting in front of the keyboard now and seems quite mesmerised by me typing. I'm going to try not to post about stevie too much, but please just let me indulge myself for now - she's only been here for a few days and is just constantly doing cute stuff. ahh.
I wish my other baby cat liked Stevie as much as we do - she currently just hisses at her a lot.

Cats with cupcakes, and kittens!

This is a particularly cat focussed post today, but as these are the best things about my weekend I felt I had to share them.
Some of you have already seen my little baby cat (mellie) in some of my older posts. She's a little bit quirky and sometimes she thinks she is a dog. She's chases things that we throw for her and brings them back, and often moves things around - for example she has taken one of my balls of wool from the living room into my bedroom.
I have a big pile of half made cards, piles of felt and fabric, buttons and the like currently on what is supposed to be a dining table. In one of the piles are card toppers, and some of paper and strings cupcakes. One night this week I saw mellie pouncing on what I thought was probably a poor spider, but no, it was a cupcake!
This has now been declared hers, and she's been intermittently running around the place with it in her mouth, attacking it, or just staring it out. The pics aren't fantastic, but she moves so fast it's quite hard to catch her on camera. I love this picture of her legging it off with the cupcake in her mouth :o) I had to take out the brads incase she swallowed them, but I guess I'll reuse them so it wasn't a total loss.

And something so sweet it would melt the heart of an ice queen. Meet Stevie. Stevie is our second baby cat. Stevie arrived today, and is currently having a kip on the sofa.

knitting, yes that's right, I did say knitting!

just a quickie, to tell everyone that Supergran is upon us already.
For the last 3 years, I have knitted little hats to raise money for Age Concern (in association with Innocent) - the idea being that us crafty types knit lots of little wool hats which will fit onto their drinks bottles - and every bottle sold with a hat raises money for people like our grandmas so that they can get help with paying their heating bills or to give them so nice warm food in the winter.
Now I'm no expert knitter but I have put an innocent hatometer on my blog to
a) encourage people to get involved and
b) remind me that I need to get knitting some hats too

Below you can see proof of my knitting skills - very basic stuff, and it's probably been a year in the making. I'm not a slow knitter, I just put it away and forgot about it for a while.
Maybe I'll just pop off a knit a few more rows now...

monster moo

I worked out that last month I worked a staggering 73 hours extra in my day job (thats like an extra 2 working weeks), and it looks like September is going to be very similar, so weekends, although precious non working time are pretty much taken up with food shopping, washing and cleaning up. This weekend however I managed to squeeze in a day trip to legoland, and also to make a monster. My ability to make stuff and indeed to blog is limited as a result, but I'm hoping in October I'll be able to take a few weeks off work to recharge my batteries, pay more attention to my crafting and of course my blog.

now to the 'moo'. a few weeks back I ordered some moo cards and they arrived earlier on this week - I was very excited about this but i'm not posting pics of them, Instead I decided to celebrate with a monster moo - you can see him here sporting a new monda loves... tag. I think however that the tag is just a little too big so maybe I'll experiment with folding the next one to see how that looks.
Monster moo will be in my esty shop tomorrow.

and the winner is...

The Vicious Chicken
A green blockhead monster called Austin
Was secretly fond of cake frosting.
It was his favourite treat,
So sticky and sweet,
But cleaning spills off his felt was exhausting...

This did indeedy make me laugh, so vicious chicken please make yourself known to me by emailing me at monda(at)homecall(dot)co(dot)uk and Austin and the Japanese bag will be on their way to you.
Some more news from the monda camp. I have been waiting for these to arrive:Finally I have some monda loves... tags to sew onto my monster creations. The bigger one is woven so will use this for some of my bigger softies, but the smaller ones are iron on transfer type lettering. I tried a few different versions here, some on grossgrain ribbon, and some onto felt - which I'm pleased to say works really well. I got a little carried away infact and ironed Austins bottom - I think it works better when you try not to iron an already stuffed monster!Tonight is Heroes night. Is anyone watching this? It's about the only thing I am watching on TV at the moment but i just love it. 'save the cheerleader, save the world' Fantastic!