Take care,
Sophie
From a beam of light along the horizon to a whole burning red cloud topping overhead, it provides inspiration and exultation alike.
We've had a very enjoyable weekend and I do have plenty of photographs to share with you so hopefully this week will have a full st of posts. Keep your eyes peeled!
Sophie
Take care,
Sophie
One of my favourite things of last year was finally succeeding in hand making Christmas gifts. A seed of an idea was planted in my mind about what I wanted to do, I Googled and I found a great YouTube tutorial and to top it off, a link to the original blog post step by step guide. It was too good to be true. After much deliberation on what fabric to buy I eventually chose a solid navy for the base and two different designs for the main character of the bag. Did I not mention I was making bags? My bad. It was a tote/shopping bag I wanted to make. Something really practical. Something that might be of some use. Everyone likes a bag to sling shopping in, or gym kit, or just to hang on a door with stuff in just to keep it off the floor. A bag is useful.
Back to the fabric. The two designs were both ones I felt would work and also would directly suit their new owners (in my mind). The cutting out of the pieces remained the most difficult and time consuming part, especially as I hate measuring and loathe trying to get everything to line up square. If I had a second pair of hands I would offload that faff in a hertbeart and get stuck into the fun pinning and machining straight away.
The first bag is always the most time consuming and fiddly with infinite double, triple checking and muddling through. Upon completion of bag number one I have to admit to almost welling up as it was far, far nicer than I could have hoped for. As a deeply amateur crafter/sewer* my capabilities are minimal and massive credit to the wonderful tutorials I followed, both of them were invaluable and together made things happen.
*(stitcher? Sewer is where waste water flows? Bah!)
My total output was six for Christmas and one for a spring birthday. As I've made mention of previously, family don't consider me a 'creative' person and consequently the feedback was that of high praise indeed (as a result of surprise, I suspect!) which made me glow in an awkward but happy way. My next mission has been to make myself one because they were really nice and I want to sling all my shopping in it and enjoy the lovely fabric! But typically, because there is no deadline (and it's been a busy spring/summer) I haven't made a start.
Unfortunately my mind is drawing a blank for this year's inspiration but I've got a little while to plan and execute before then.
Have you hand made presents? How did it go?
Sophie
Above, a fabulous shade of purple on the pompom dahlias.
Below, agapanthus in full flower. How vibrant!
Sophie
I've been very lucky over the years with this little blog; there have been some wonderful opportunities crop up and I've had the pleasure of sharing plenty of things I love on here. When I started writing way back in 2011 (was it then? was it further back? I can't even remember) it was a relatively new thing, some really quirky blogs were out there with the coolest of people I didn't know, yet felt like I'd befriended. We wrote about what we wore, what we ate, what we slapped on our faces. The bigger bloggers had over 1000 followers of GFC, remember that? I didn't dream of becoming that big. Fast forward to 2017 and the big bloggers have millions of followers and are online glossy magazines. They are models, they are celebrities and they are the chefs du jour.
Things have snowballed. I don't feel like I'm their friends at all. I feel like I'm Cinderella who most certainly isn't going to the ball and instead is stuck in the back room, cleaning.
The blogs I do read are predominantly written by people I rely on to tell me it straight, not to sell me things or make me feel inferior.
It's always been a joy to feature items here on the blog which are a seamless fit with things I usually talk about and we all enjoy. My favourite collaborations have been to style up clothes and shoes but everything I've been sent to feature has been a choice, things I believe in.
I've been getting more and more grumpy over the conflict between Google's good practice for Bloggers and the way brands/PRs are operating. Everyone knows you have to openly disclose if you are gifted an item or include a paid link or have been sponsored in some manner for material. But did you know that if, for example, I am sent a watch to feature, then any links to that Brand's site have to be no-follow links (I'm poor at the technical explanation but which means that Google won't track them to count towards giving their site more credibility/thus ranking them higher in searches as a consequence of the link).
Well, I've lost count of the amount of times I've been approached about featuring something (I get an interesting email about every two weeks at the moment, even that has plummeted), only for them to say they need a (do) follow link and therefore we don't proceed. While I'm talking about things, I signed up for goodness knows how many blogging site 'opportunities' years ago and have virtually only ever got press releases which are zero interest and clog up my inbox. Also so many things about reviewing vitamin pills and poor quality products of below £1 in value....
There have also been some really lovely offers to work with some brands/little independent businesses that I've turned down because I don't feel I can give them value for money and it would be wrong to go ahead with really only me benefiting from the arrangement.
As a point of information I can only recall once asking to work with a local business on a post (and I'm embarrassed about that time). These days I wouldn't wish to approach anyone as I can't profess to offer much. I take great care to create content that everyone would like and stress over thinking that I'd ever get any feedback to the effect of 'we'd hoped for better' which makes me feel sick about.
I'd like to think that people would say things like 'Sophie plays fair' because I really think it's important to stick to the rules. I'm not here to rip anyone off, plunder local resources or make a mint out of anyone, I use this blog to share things I enjoy and think that, as a reader, you might enjoy too. When I see plenty of other bloggers clearly flouting the rules of disclosure and Google's good practice policy it really makes me cross because clearly they're breaking rules but it's not being policed.
It's been a real rant but I feel like it's just not fair on bloggers that play fair at the moment. The chances of my little blog growing are so tiny, I love what I do and wish that more people came to have a little read once in a while. Thank YOU for reading this and for coming back sometimes. It really makes me happy. While it looks like there won't be much in the way of collaboration opportunities on the horizon, I can assure you that my enthusiasm for sharing content I care about continues.
Take care,
Sophie
