I've just started teaching my seven year old daughter to sew and she loves it! When she's not hand sewing, she's using my old faithful "New Home" [now Janome] machine which was my Mum's old faithful. I'm now lusting after a Bernina Artista 730E Embroidery Machine, but while I'm saving up the £4,000, I think we could have fun making Barbie ballgowns with this mini-sewing machine from John Lewis. I'm a sucker for pillar-box-red home accessories, so much so there's now a ban on red kitchen accessories in our house! It's so cute in retro red. Will Santa deliver?

Back-up your back-ups!

I am so relieved to have completed the website re-build! When my old computer died on me and I discovered that my website back-ups had not saved to the portable hard-drive where I thought they were automatically saving, I really thought I couldn't take much more. I was so pleased to be throwing myself back into Velvet Boutique after having to take most of the year off to deal with and recover from breast cancer, that I started to think that maybe I was cursed! Well, it's definitely a lesson to always have two back-ups and double check that they are where you think they are. Luckily we didn't lose our extensive family photo archives, which could have been the straw that broke this old camel! Well, tonight I am triumphant and undefeated. Yey!

Have a browse, there are so many lovely items for all budgets...

http://www.velvetboutique.co.uk/acatalog/index2.htm

Happy Halloween Memories

I miss art college! I miss the infamous Halloween parties. I can’t decide which was my favourite year? The one we all went as Batman characters or the Austin Powers themed one…? I will never forget a fellow student who would spend months on his costumes and would inevitably win the “best costume” every year. One year he was Jabba the Hut – brilliant! And the next year he really out-did himself: a “Borg” from Star Trek – it was so realistic, I was scared that “resistance was futile” and I would be assimilated into the Borg’s single consciousness to wreak havoc across the universe!

How was your Halloween? I have spent the last three years living Halloween through my children :-( Daddy is pretty good with the scary face paints wouldn’t you agree?! This year I really wanted to dress up too, so I painted a pretty big bat flying across a moon on my cheek and then realized I’d have to walk to the office on my own after dropping the kids at school and nursery! Let me just say that most of the people I passed that morning seemed to have forgotten it was Halloween.

Just to prove our two are adorable under all that freaky face paint!

Bounding Back

This year I’ve been forced to keep Velvet Boutique on a low profile, which was so frustrating. Since my breast cancer diagnosis in January, I felt that 2008 was getting sucked into a black hole, but it turns out that I am one of the lucky ones – early detection ladies – be breast aware! Now that I’ve been expertly patched back up, I am in a constant state of optimism. I am [metaphorically] bounding back this Autumn in a design fever and with a new accolade:

REGIONAL SHORT-LIST IN THE O2 X AWARDS
- FASHION BUSINESS CATEGORY, SPONSORED BY GRAZIA

Yey! How utterly fabulous! I’ve posted the show stopping neckpiece I wore on the day of the panel interview – everyone loved it. I must confess that Lorraine Linton is one of my favourite designers. Her tactile label “Into” is one I drool over. We are now discussing an exclusive capsule collection (picture secretive whispers over a bottle of Shiraz). If you cannot wait, then check out her knitted accessories in the boutique.

Talking of neck adornment… I am loving that new-vintage look just now. Eclectic Shock is really a trend-setter in this genre. What’s not to love when you are getting a one-off piece of jewellery which has been created from antique curios which the designer, Louise, has painstakingly collected from antique markets up and down the country? And they sparkle!