Live the Pooh way

The Makery is marvellous!

We love to make and buy crafts and gifts so when we heard about The Makery opening in Barugh Green we couldn't wait to go. My friends bought me a lovely wooden ornament for my birthday before I got chance to go and Ioved it! It is run by Greenacre school as Opening Doors, an enterprise for students aged 19 to 35.  Here, students and adults make wonderful crafts for the public to buy. It is also a cafe and again, students serve you lovely food and drinks.
We loved it on our first visit and have been lots of times since. They do a variety of rijo coffees and drinks and the menu has lovely sandwiches and cakes. They do afternoon tea but we haven't had one yet. My friend's daughter had a children's platter and she loved it.

We love the metal teapots that hold the cutlery and the little homely touches. There are always seasonal crafts for you to buy. At the moment there are crocheted hens and chicks holding onto Cadbury Cream eggs!

The selection of crafts are very good and we love browsing the shelves at the crochet things. My fave was the crochet hand gel holder! There are so many lovely hand made cards too. I love their pictures and paintings and have taken home a pencil drawn hamster and a painted giraffe to come and live with me.
We always enjoy our visits to The Makery. They inspire us to go home and make something ourselves! There is a Coffee and Crafting group on a Tuesday that my friend and I would love to attend. It's called Craft and Chatter and is sst up by Qdos Creates. The idea is you make some things, taking them home and perhaps leaving one in the shop to be sold. That's a lot of chat and coffee drinking too so what's not to like?

I feel we are really lucky having a place like The Makery. It's very therapeutic crafting and chatting. I have tried to learn how to crochet at a Charity crochet evening but I just kept drinking my tea and asking my friend next to me to help me. I'll stick to knitting scarves! Seriously, I tried and tried but just could not get it! I have some serious respect for crochet people. I will have to look up the name for them!

My lovely friend Melanie crochets and has made us some wonderful things! She has raised money for Barnsley Youth Choir by selling her gorgeous crochet animals and teddies. She is so talented and has a Facebook page for it. She takes such care making each teddy that you know they truely are handmade with love. The amount of detail is amazing and she makes their clothes and shoes too. I love the dogs she makes in particular. She makes them as close to the pet and uses a photo of them to help her.

She has just posted this on her Crochet by Melanie Facebook page and it needs sharing.  I recommend her to everyone because the quality of all her products is amazing.

She is such a wonderful person and makes all her crochet things with mich love, thinking of the people she is making them for. She pays attention to everything and the finished products are so cute and amazing! I love my Get Well Soon bear she made for me with a healing heart on a necklace.

I can't write this blog without nentuonning the woollen toilet roll holder dolls. Such a thing in the 70s and 80s. Practically every loo had one! There were so many pictures to choose from!

Back to knitting. I grew up watching my grandma, mum and aunties knit and I loved it. I made some lovely scarves. I would like to pick up my needles and knit again. My friend is amazing and knitted my daughter some lovely cardigans when she was younger with fab buttons. We'd choose the wool and buttons together which was a lovely thought. As did my mother in law's friend. I loved all those knitted cardigans for Wintertime. This would easily be the two of them.

Again, I am amazed at the talent. I can only knit oblong shapes that have to be scarves. Or table runners, perhaps? My other friend has knitted dolls. My goodness! These folk who can crochet and knit are like Wonder woman. There's actual proof on Pinterest!

My mother in law's good friend received a cake for her birthday and it waa just up het street! These cakes by Emma are amazing.

I love this quote; it's so full of promise!

I love reading and this book was so feel good, it made me want to go out and buy sone knitting needles there and then!

My friends and I used to love making pom poms when we were younger. I loved wrapping the wool around the cardboard and cutting it before revealing the pom pom. I can still remember this red and lemon and a baby blue and pastel pink. Gorgeous!

I love these ideas for pom poms to make. How fab do those liquorice all sorts look?

Onto sewing! I loved seeing at primary school with the little square of binca. All the different stitches like running and cross stitch. This picture from Pinterest brings back so many lovely memories.

When I typed in cross stitch the tiny cross stitch patterns on a frame came up. I really feel the need to take up cross stitching and make these kind of messages!

As a Primary teacher, I have fond memories of sewing with binca (houses mainly!) I loved these sessions. Even though most of it was rethreading the needle! We spent many sessions working with felt and vivelle designing and making finger and hand puppets. When I was looking for inspiration for shops selling these, I came across Without a Doubt Interiors in Sheffield. How gorgeous are these? I love the felt bunting!

This then reminded me of the lovely handmade bags, purses and key rings by Touchy Feely Textiles. I love their fabric they use with the bright colours and lovely  patterns. The quotes are really good too. These are lovely I found on their Facebook page.

I love how artists share each other's work on social media and support each other. Touchy Feely Textiles had shared GladRags page, that sold gorgeous felt flowers. Everything I saw can be bought om Etsy.

I remember enjoying my sewing lessons at Secondary and loved using the sewing machine. However, the machine didn't really love me back much and I wasn't very good at it! My sister in law, is amazing at sewing and has made her family and friends some gorgeous gifts for birthdays and Christmases. Her products are hand made with such care and she chooses gorgeous material for her tissue holders, toiletry bags, purses, bags and slippers.

She has made my daughter some lovely stuff and all her friends would say that they wanted an Aunty Julie bag too!

She makes seasonal goodies and decorations and we love her Easter bunnies and carrots, Halloween pumpkins, Christmas baubles and Christmas stockings. Brilliant!

My sister in law is so creative and is such a natural at it. She just oozes creativity and any project she touches is wonderful. She has a magical effect on anything she puts her mind to. Making jams, chocolates, chocolate strawberries and raspberries. You name it. She can make it! We once went fruit picking when we went to visit and as we rested after in the front room, she went into the kitchen. Minutes later and Voila! The tastiest, most gooey Eton Mess was there, made with our hand picked fruits. Marvellous!

My friend who loves sewing has taken me to Oh Sew Sweet at Wombwell twice now and treated me to coffee and cake. The Bolthole cafe is so cosy and the homemade food is lovely. I love their montage on Facebook.

We always have a nosy at all the marvellous material and patterns to buy. They have workshops there and people's beautiful work is displayed everywhere.

My lovely friend is such a good seamstress and has lots of projects on the go. She is also very good at jewellery making! She is panda mad and was eyeing up.some material. Before we knew it, she'd bougt tins of the stuff to make a gorgeous blanket! This quote made me laugh and made me think of her. And it's the same with books for us both!

When I looked on Pinterest, I fell in love with these dolls from Etsy. These are so cute and each one is named. There's a little write up for each one which is lovely. The first is called Suzana and she loves eating ice cteam and walking bare feet on the sand. She has this saying embroided onto her: ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE IF YOU BELIEVE. How sweet? Her friend is called Olivia and she loves family reunions on a Sunday. Embroided onto her is DO IT WITH PASSION OR NOT AT ALL. Wonderful!

These others from Etsy are so cute too. Dolls for kids and grown ups too! You are never too old to have a teddy or a doll!

These remind me of the wonderful Turnesc faeries that we found at a lovely Craft fair at Cannon Hall. The stall just wowed us and we had to go over. The lady at the stall was so lovely and you could see how passionate she was about her handmade fairies and fairy garden. She sells handmade fairies, fairy gardens and items to make your own fairy garden. I love these ideas from Pinterest and will get round to making one soon!

I could look forever at the tiny furniture you can buy it handmade for the natural effect. I lpve the idea of drinking champagne just to make a few little seats for your fairies to sit on!

I also love the tiny fairy gardens in a little tea cup and saucer. There are so many ideas!

When we were choosing our fairy to take home from the craft fair, we knew we had to have this little auburn haired fairy with the blue dress.

There were so many lovely fairies to choose from though and I think these are gorgeous.

Just look at the delicate dress with its petals. You can tell these have been made with love.

We do love going to The Range, grabbing a few more supplies and crafting on the table. We have the music in the background and get lost in a crafting little bubble! We like to buy the easels and make patterns on them using buttons. I don't know why but I really have a thing for buttons. This probably goes back years to where I'd play with my grandma's button box. It was like a little box of treasure! They've always fascinated me! I'd love putting my hand in the middle of the box and they'd fall through my fingers like sand through a sieve.

I used to line them up in order of size then reorder them in colour. I love all the different patterns on them too. As a teacher, I'd love getting my collection of buttons out for the children to choose and put them on their art work and cards.

This lovely button heart is gorgeous and very effective. My friend bought me a lovely red button heart framed from a craft fair at Elsecar. I kept trying to look in her carrier bag , not realising my present was in it!

Tbese buttons reminded me of making the button people years ago. I used to love making these using different colours.

I then got to thinking about the quirky, button jewellery I have bought over the years. I had a fab red and cream bracelet from the Cooper Gallery that was lovely. These earrings, rings, bracelets and necklaces are brill! We once went to a craft evening at Les Cadeaux in Darton where we ate loads of yummy cake and made our own jewellery. That was a fab night.

We always have a cuppa as crafting is thirsty work! I love this Pinterest quote!

I suppose my creativity comes out in my writing these blogs and I love weiying my poetry. I took GCSE Pottery but most of my pots were broken in the kiln room. You couldn't actually tell the difference! My love of drawing, pastelling and painting came as I was teaching the chidren Art. I was learning techniques also from a talented friend who came in to help. My favourite is using pastels, oil and chalk and I used to love setting up my room with a table, tablecloth, vase of flowers and bowl of fruit for the children to make their oen interpretations of the artist Matisse. Children are wonderful encouragers and they'd come up and I'd hear so many Wows of them. Some even high fived my work! I felt so proud of my work, as if it was worth millions the way they responded!

I must get back to pastelling and painting and I'm hopefully going to buy an easel. Why ever not? Looked up some more Mattisse and found these wonderful paintings. I'll look up Cezanne too. I'll have enough Art work to keep me going a long time!

I love this quote about painting. It makes me want to go out and paint blank canvases all over the world.

This made me think of the amazing work Creative Recovery is doing around Barnsley to help people in their recoveries. Art is so therapeutic, whatever the medium and whatever the end product. I loved this butterfly mural from The Old George by Creative Recovery and it always made me smile. My friend and I once attended a craft evening at Sara's cafe with Creative Recovery and painted on a canvas whilst chatting to every one. Such a lovely evening.

Crafting and making is so therapeutic. Whatever you are making, creating something from scratch is so rewarding. It's lovely having pride in your work. It doesn't need to be a masterpiece or a work of art. It just needs to be made with love.

This quote sums adulting up for a knitter! Lots and lots of wool and plenty of coffee!