Anna is an Artist

Anna is an artist. She likes to think of herself as bohemian and tries to dress in a slightly unconventional way. She usually has her sketch book in her bag so that she can stop and sketch or paint when the inspiration strikes. At the moment she's working on ideas for an exhibition called 'nature in all its colours' which she will be part of in October. If you would like to go to the exhibition with her then you can contact her at my etsy shop.

Work in Progress

Life is pretty busy at the moment and I'm tired! so just a quick blog post to show what I'm working on at the moment. Hope you like her :)

Cream Cheese Brownies and Amigurumi

For those of you (is there anyone?) who read my blog regularly you might remember a month or so back I posted something about cream cheese brownies. I posted that because the amigurumi I was working on was for a friend and she didn't want anyone to see it before her and so as I couldn't blog about amigurumi that day I blogged about baking instead! Well I have now seen that friend and given her the doll so I can now show you some pictures. I'm really happy with how she turned out. I think the eyes are great - even though I may say so myself! And the bag is pretty good too :) The doll is about 30cm tall. And funnily enough, today I made some more cream cheese brownies for a Hen night that I'm just about to go to!

Etsy Craft Party

Welcome to our Etsy Craft Party! The people at Etsy encouraged Etsians all over the world to have craft parties on 18th June in celebration of Etsy's 5th Birthday. I have a friend,BlessedFlower, who is preparing to open an etsy shop and so together we decided to organise a party here in our town Mostar. There are not many Etsy sellers in Bosnia and Herzegovina and there is only one other in our town (well 2 cos they're a married couple, but it's one shop!). We wrote to all the Etsy sellers in BiH to let them know about the party but most of them live in the capital city, Sarajevo and it is too far for them to travel for one night. But the other Etsy sellers from Mostar came and it was great to meet them. They make amazing jewellery, you can check it out in their Etsy shop - Lottaart.

The idea of our party was to have fun encouraging other people to be creative. We prepared different activities for people to try:

• crocheting bags with plarn
• making sock monkeys
• sewing flowers
• making altered art journals

We also had a good supply of cookies, brownies and other snacks :)

Everyone had a great time and hopefully we encouraged those already creative people to try new things and we awakened the sleeping creativity in everyone else!

Tutorial - How to make bunting from old magazines

How many of you went to an Etsy Craft Party on Friday night? I organised one here in Mostar and we had a great time. I'll post some photos and write more about that another day, today I want to share with you how I made bunting for the party, cos you can't have a party without bunting!

What you need:

• old magazines


• 10 metres of 1 inch ribbon


• pins


• scissors


• sewing machine

How to:

• take a page of a magazine and fold it into 4 (see picture a)


• cut the paper from the bottom left corner to the top of the first fold and then from the top of that fold to the bottom of the next and from the bottom of that fold to the top of the next fold and from the top of that fold to the bottom right corner of the page. (see picture b)


• throw away the 2 end pieces and you have 3 triangles of bunting.


• pin the triangles to the ribbon. (see picture c)


• repeat this as many times as necessary to make the length of bunting you want.


• sew the triangles to the ribbon. (see picture d)

And it's as easy as that!

House Hunting

Those of you who have been following my blog for a while will know that I am an English girl living in Bosnia Herzegovina. Why am I living here? I'm working for a UK Christian charity called Novi Most. Novi Most is all about bringing the hope of a better future to the young people of Bosnia Herzegovina, empowering them and giving them new opportunites through youth work. At the moment we (me and my husband) live in Mostar but in the autumn we will be moving together with another couple to start a new youth work initiative in a town called Jajce. We are really excited about all that will happen there - but first we need to find somewhere to live, so that's what we're doing this week - house hunting!

This cute house necklace is made by Cute Creations. I totally love her acrylic jewellery. I don't really wear jewellery like that myself but I love her necklaces so much I got one anyway and it hangs on my bookcase! It is a slice of battenberg cake with a smiley face - and it always makes me smile when I look at it. It was actually what inspired me to make this amigurumi!

why bamboo?

Does anyone know why you can get crochet hooks made of different materials? plastic, metal, bamboo etc... Do they make any difference to how what you make turns out or is it just personal preference? I've been using metal hooks until now but when I was in UK I decided to by a couple of bamboo hooks in case I ever want to crochet on a plane! No pointy metal things are allowed in your hand luggage. I've tried using them and I haven't seen any difference in the crochet but I don't think they slip through the wool as easily as metal ones so I'll probably just keep them for plane usuage. And in case you're wondering, the other strange object in the photo is a Droplet from Jam Factory - the second vinyl toy in my collection of 2!

Where is the sales fairy?

I decided to take a break from making my custom orders to make something to go into my shop. It's amazing how quickly shop views go down if you don't list items and shop views is what it's all about! I know that people like my stuff and that they will buy it because when I was featured on the storque I got 4 sales in 2 days but now it's been a while since the sales fairy visited my shop and it's all to do with views. How can I get more people to view my shop? I use facebook and twitter (although I'm not that good at twitter) and this blog but still I'm not getting enough visitors. I've bought this book - the Handmade Marketplace by Kari Chapin and my homework now is to read it and learn all I can to find out how to best market and sell my stuff. And if you're interested in seeing my newest item in my shop click here!

Thailand in Trafalgar Square

Yesterday was a productive day - one down and two to go on the custom amigurumis.

This picture of me was taken at the Thai Festival in Trafalgar Square, London last Saturday. There were Thai dancers and musicians, take-away restaurants, grocery shops, tourism stands, a temple and loads more - take a look at this flickr page to see more of what was going on. This lady with her amazingly long gold fingernail thingys was outside the temple.

Back home again

I'm back home now after my trip to the UK. Back home and back to work on amigurumis but I have 3 custom orders to work on all of which are being made as presents for people so I won't post any pictures here because you never know who will see them! Instead I'll post a few things about my trip to the UK.

I visited the Kidrobot store in Earlham Street, London - near Covent Garden. It's a fab shop full of cute and weird things! I bought a little zip pull thing in the Luckies Series. They come in blind boxes so you don't know what you've bought til you open the box. If you look closely at the picture you can see the little thing I got - a yellow smiley face monkey type thing! And don't you think the bag it came is awesome too?

Pop Britannia

I'm in the UK at the moment visiting friends and family - hence the lack of blog posts! As I haven't got time to make amigurumis on this trip I thought I'd do a blog post about something British instead. I had a quick look on etsy for things made using the Union Jack flag and I found this amazingly cool cushion set from the Pop Britannia range at Karen Hilton Designs. Using some of the most recognisable British icons, it comes in 4 different colour ways.