The Berylune Blog

I have an announcement from Zoë regarding our next Book Club meet up:

 
For our next book club meeting we have an interesting pair of books for you to pick from! Either the well loved classic Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen or the fascinating look at the coverage of science stories in main stream media, Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. You have until 24th September to cast your vote below or on...

This week's Friday find is a bit late, sorry! Yesterday, we celebrated Zoë's birthday. We had a lovely time showering her with gifts, drinking champagne and eating delicious food from Kayal (our second visit in as many weeks!). Zoë got me drunk, but really I think it was Amy's fault for not turning up early enough to help with the champagne.

This pretty Midwinter conserve pot was found by Zoë, and...

Zoë & I were out searching for goodies the other day when we spied this pretty little tin. Imagine our glee when we found it to be full of buttons! Buttons, buttons, buttons. Nothing makes our pulses face faster than finding a hidden button treasure. Joy.


The tin will be made in to one of our 'Vintage Tin Sewing Kits'. The buttons will be added to our growing stash which, once we have finished...

Ha! You thought I'd forgotten, didn't you? It might be the eleventh hour, but it's still Wednesday. I've just returned home from Kayal, where we were out celebrating my Mum's Birthday. I shan't say which one it was, but it was a significant landmark. Kayal is amazing, if you haven't been, you should go. I had a scrummy fish thing that was baked in a palm leaf or something. And the breads... Oh,...

Sorry! I posted on Facebook the winner of the battle of the books, but I completely forgot to update the blog.
The winner was Blind Faith by Ben Elton.

I read City of Bones anyway, because I'm becoming a young adult fiction fan, and can highly recommend it. It's actually been released as a film recently, Zoë and I popped to see it on Friday. It wasn't half bad, but read the book first if you can.

We'...

I've had a fun few days!

On Wednesday night, Fiona taught a fabulous workshop on Styling your Crafts. Zoë attended along with 5 other lovely crafty & creative people, wanting to learn more about photographing their products to sell online. Everyone had such lovely goodies to photograph! Liz, our friendly neighbourhood vintage ice cream van driver, also came along to learn a bit about photographing...

Some birds turned up:

I've been at Denise's Hens' do this evening. We had great fun, I got to turn Charlotte in to a swan with toilet paper.

This week's Friday find is from Zoë - she found these gorgeous Rosti Danish egg cups, which are now for sale in the shop:


They're really tactile and stack beautifully.

This week I watched jumbo lolly sticks (or tongue depressors) soak in water for three days, so I could bend them around a shampoo bottle (slowly), tie them in place with some wool and spend a day watching them dry. I lost momentum at this point, so Amy wrapped this one in rainbow stripes of Washi tape and Zoë modeled the result. Team effort.

Much to Gladys and Beryl's delight, ManE has returned from his long stay in the U S of A. We've been  enjoying pictures of  ManE's adventures over on his Knitted Man blog. Judging by the delicious looking food he helped Zoë and Paul eat, we're surprised he can still fit in his knitted jumper!

This week's Washi Wednesday follows on from last week quite nicely. If you are a bit clumsy with a craft knife, why not let your wounds heal in style?


Our new delivery of washi finally arrived last week. Our parcel was supposed to be here a couple of months ago, but our supplier unfortunately didn't note my new delivery address and posted it to the old one. Which is such a...

You thought I'd forgotten, didn't you?

Amy has covered one of our light switches in washi! Oh, the joy. We've been joined in our washi-worship today by Kiara over at Bakery Cakery. It's catching.

We also got a mention over on the Crafty Magazine blog today - click here to read what they've said about the Etsy Craft Party we organised with Zoë at Sew Make Believe and Lara from Sewsmith. Thanks...

Thank you all, so, so much! All 75+ people (we lost count), that came to our Etsy craft party and made it fabulous.

We ate, drank and crafted. We carved rubber stamps, made cardboard owls, sewed felt brooches, made macrame bracelets, drilled and glued key rings, made washi tape jewellery, knitted, nattered and generally had a ball!

One for stationery lovers! I saw these over at 'How About Orange' - a necklace made from paperclips and washi tape. So this afternoon I set about making my own, which Zoë kindly modeled for me:


Maybe we can make some of these at our craft party on 20th June? Have you booked your ticket yet?

We have teamed up with Sewsmith (aka Lara, who teaches screen printing and other fabulous workshops in our studio), and Sew Make Believe (a popular, Leamington based crafting and book club meet-up group that our good friend Zoë helps organise),...

We had a shop full of lovely, talented people today! Lara, Denise, Zoë and Fiona all happened to be in at the same time, so we shared a pot of tea.Lara was dropping off her fabulous (and enormous) macrame pot...

We took it in turns to pop down to the town hall for the Save the Children gig yesterday. I'll be honest, we did more buying than selling! Foot fall was poor, but it gave us a good opportunity to...

We had a fabulous birthday. I got to give presents to little girls (and big ones) and many cakes were eaten. Amy and Denise wore big puffy frocks. We got some lovely 1st birthday cards and Roisin even brought us...

We have new things! Amy and Zoë  have been busy making book bags from retro fabric, modeled below by some random librarian we found in the street.

The bunnies had to go back to their hutches (well, shelves), as Easter has drawn to an end. So Amy put her rainbow-filled thinking cap on to come up with a new window display. What do you think the first thing that came to mind was?

Zoëkindly made us some more beautiful felt brooches - this time in the shape of a bird, with a plume of brightly coloured feathers. And...