Busy busy busy...

Well, I've been pretty busy recently with a whole variety of things...

...my first custom order at my shop - yay!  I'll blog about this in more detail in due course, but here are the necklaces I came up with:  Nebula, Chestnut and Midnight Rose.

...learning some more origami - I always include a wee origami crane in with my orders, so wanted to experiment with some other designs to see if they could be alternatives.  Here is a butterfly and a lily along with a crane.

...the biggest excitement is that I've signed up to do my first ever craft fair!  A wee while ago craft fairs Scotland contacted me through Etsy inviting me to apply to exhibit at their craft fairs.  After checking out one of their fairs in Portobello last weekend, I decided to go for it!  (*gulp*).  I'm pretty excited about it, but there is so much to organise... (actually, who am I kidding, I love to organise, and this gives me an excuse to make lots of my favourite thing: lists!!).

So, the craft fair I'm doing is on the 2nd May (the day after my birthday!) back in Portobello.  I'm now trying to build up a store of things to sell.  I was thinking about making some more fibre-y cards, and came up with these whilst playing with my embellisher yesterday:

Not quite sure how they're going to end up yet.  I'll keep you posted!

...I've also started my first online course - an embroidery course called "Personal Library of Stitches" on joggles.com.  I found out about it through Flickr after seeing some amazing photos of work by students from previous courses.  It's been really interesting so far, and pretty challenging.  Here are the first two samplers I have made as part of the classes:

... and then last but not least, here is what else I've been up to:

I finally got around to arranging some lessons after my attempts at learning the basics myself were, shall we say, less than successful!  In my first lesson, my teacher was helpfully able to explain that no, I didn't need to somehow make my limited number of fingers cover all of those keys and that the reason I hadn't been able to play an 'F' was because the key was bent!  (I did buy my flute on eBay...!).  Anyway, some repairs and a few lessons later, I am able to make a slightly better noise than a breathy screech (just about).  It's an amazing instrument, and so different from anything I have learned before.  So many things to think about!

So, there you go - lots of stuff going on!

I've also been lucky enough to be featured in a blog for the first time (thanks, Myfanwy :D) which has been very exciting!

Now I think I need to have a wee rest and a cup of tea :D