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One of the best things about taking Halfpenny Home out and about to a craft fair is the packing up of all our most favourite things...this Aspalls bag has been used an awful lot and not always just for the lovely Aspalls Cyder bottles it was originally designed to carry - it's also perfect for transporting the handpainted knitting needles that we love using!

It was my turn to choose which of our favourite goodies from HH HQ I wanted to take along to the Saint's Fair in Ipswich, a BRILLIANT craft fair organised by the rather wonderful Jess and Chris combo imakefunstuff - it's always a lot of fun!

As you can see I decided to show off just some of the ribbons, ric rac and trimmings that we have along with some rather wonderful Knit Collage and Gedgrave Flock yarns!
It was lovely to meet people that had read about Jacqui and I in the EADT piece by Steven Russell 'The Tweeter and the Tax Investigator' BUT the highlight (for me!) was meeting up with a fellow Tweeter @katiewardwriter ! Katy has just had her first novel Girl Reading published and as we are all local writers Ipswich Waterstones have been so very supportive and organised events for us!
Twitter brings the most unlikely people together - crafty girl meets a proper author! Katie is as lovely in real life as she is on Twitter! (as this bit of the blog is all about my obsession with twitter I should add a :-) right about now...) as I also met up with @katyark who I have met a lot in real life but didn't realise she was her...and she dodged the camera, tsk!

Look at those scrumptious yarns...irresistable!

The other great bit of Sunday was that on arrival I found that the HH stall was right next to a great friend of both Jacqui and I! Anita is a glass blower and she runs amazing workshops where you can transform old glass into beautiful pieces of art for your home!

Some of the fantastic cheeseboards that Anita makes from old wine bottles.

All this socialising and chatting about craft can build up quite an appetite but I never bother with taking along a picnic (unusual for me!) for the Saint's Fair as the food on sale there is always fab!

What a lovely day, Nic x

We love glass at Halfpenny Home - anyone visiting us would notice that pretty swiftly!
Buttons, ribbons and yarns have all graced a cake stand at some time...
We have enjoyed playing with discarded and no longer useful glass with Anita, her workshops are great fun and everybody comes away with different things.

I was particularly pleased with this flower pendant which is currently gracing the chandelier in my kitchen and the square bowl with flashes of orange and blue which cradles pears on my old kitchen table.

Our love of glass and a text message from Lisa at the Museum of East Anglian Life inspired us to have a little bit of a Halfpenny Home competition!

We are amazingly proud of A Green Guide to Country Crafts published by CICO books Ltd. recently and Lisa had sent us a picture of a copy on sale in a branch of Waterstones located in Leamington Spa.
When you are next browsing through the craft section of your local bookshop and happen to come across a copy of CC then please snap it, send it to us and we'll enter you into a draw!

The prize is a real life Halfpenny...

set in glass at Anita's workshop and totally unique in every way!
You can enter more than once (but they must be different shops!) and the deadline is the end of April 2011 send them to halfpennyhome@googlemail.com

And finally (and just because I wanted to post one..) a photo of Rory from last week - getting bigger! Meetings at Jacqui's take longer but are a lot of fun with a puppy to play with...!

Get snapping and good luck, Nic x

Everything on the allotment is bursting into life which must mean that Spring is on it's way!

I'm hoping for sloes on this blackthorn bush this year..

I was worried that I may have planted this garlic a little late due to all the rain that we had last year but it's all sprouted, I love garlic!

Dyeing with woad is always exciting so we didn't need a lot of persuading to get the dye pots out again!

The dyebath is yellow and the blue only develops when the dye reacts with oxygen in the air. We were dyeing some of the crocheted puffballs along with some wool blankets and some cotton interlining. Jane uses the interlining to make the gills of bracket fungi!

After a great day of dyeing I paid a visit to another artist's studio My Red Studio is just up the road from Halfpenny Home and is where Amy Louise Nettleton is currently working - we were really excited to hear that she had found somewhere nearby and I couldn't wait to see her studio.

Red, red, red!

Jacqui very generously treated me to a glass workshop with Anita Honeyball for Christmas with the condition that she came along too! Jacqui has attended a couple of these sessions before and I've always been so very impressed with all of the things that she has produced and it's almost all made with recycled materials that would otherwise be thrown away.
Jacqui and I were joined by our good friends Lisa and Gay as well as Maria B who organises the Ark and Craft Markets in Needham Market held on the 3rd Saturday of every month. Anita will also be at this month's event which will be on Saturday 19th February.

Anita's studio is a treat for the eyes - there are beautiful objects everywhere! These cheese plates are made from bottles that have been heated in a kiln.

You can't help but be inspired to create when you see all the pieces of coloured glass...

As you can see in the picture of the table below we were all very productive!

All that creativity can make you very hungry!

We even managed to make good use of one of the bottle cheese plates during lunch, I love glass so a whole day of playing with it was a real treat for me - I can't wait to see how all the pieces look after they have been fired!

Just look at the fantastic colours of the 'Stingray' glass bowls - I have a one in a kingfisher blue which I brought from Anita the very first time I met her at Treasures of Suffolk and I really love it! What a great way to spend a week, Nic x

I was spurred into action this weekend and got a few crafty makes finished!

Firstly, these two wooden hearts. The large one is painted in Farrow & Ball's London Stone, the medium one is Nutmeg by Laura Ashley. These are for a Halfpenny Home customer who'd bought two similar hearts before Christmas and wanted some more for a gift. It's really special doing something you know someone values enough to give as a gift. Hopefully, she'll be pleased.

Then it was onto cards. So out came my stash of ribbons and lace! This is just a small fraction of my hoard!

I used a punch from Stampin Up, a lovely bird on a branch design, which is one of my favourites at the moment. They are really nice punches to use and the ink pads are very good quality too! Of course, I had to finish off with a button too!

Within a week we've had two invites, one to a Golden Wedding and the other to a Wedding. So, two acceptances were required! The wedding theme is blue and silver so the colour scheme was easy for that one! On the other acceptance I made two little quilled hearts from quilling paper.