New fabrics and designs

!!!UPDATE!!! My current blog can be found here www.bilberrywoods.com/blog

If you are after a pattern for the mice below, visit my Etsy shop www.etsy.com/uk/shop/BilberryWoods

The last couple of weeks I've been designing owls and mice in new fabric combinations and lavender hearts with different animals that can be personalized with an initial. The hearts are still under development like many of my new items, but hopefully, in the next couple of weeks, they will be ready for the production.

I also visited once more the lovely Mill where I get all the fabrics from and managed to take quite a few ends of rolls with me....

Now I have lots of fabrics to make all sorts of things – a Kingfisher, a Frog and some white and red Christmas decorations etc.  And by the way, the pig I designed some time ago and said I would take a picture to show you isn't that nice after all... There is something about it that I don't like, but I don't quite know what.... So there will be no photos until it looks like a proper pig.

But back to the owls and mice which I think are working well in my newly purchased fabrics.

I must have made nearly twenty different owls and ten mice before I was able to make my selection of eight owls and four mice. The trouble is that I have to make them up, at least up to this stage before I can say which combination works and which doesn't! Sometimes I complain that I'd like to see the item perfectly in my mind before it is done and could skip this stage altogether to save some precious time, but then again I think it is the vital part of the creating a new item and when unexpected surprises happen...

The reason I was making these owls and mice, is that there is an amazing possibility for me to go truly international with my animals if this latest deal goes through! I won't say more about it now, in case I jinx it somehow by talking about it aloud (well, writing about it), but I will certainly let you know when I know something solid and then you can see the finished items.


Another activity that has taken up my evenings has been madly picking raspberries from our garden.

I would say that I almost have obsessive-compulsive disorder when it comes to picking berries: I simply cannot leave any into a bush, impossible!!

So therefore I've had to go every other night and pick raspberries for about an hour and a half at the time to get all the ripe ones picked! This is the amount I picked one night alone...

Then there is one more thing I'd like to show you from our garden since it is pretty much the same colour as the raspberries: this wonderful rose that I've never seen with some many flowers before! 

It has had absolutely no attention what so ever, no pruning, no feeding and look at how it is blossoming!

The end of the branches look like bunches of grapes and I think it is absolutely fabulous! One of those small pleasures in life.