Wednesday, July 1, 2015

It's summer!



Welcome to the summer and I love it!  It's the festival season, especially here in France where the streets and towns come to life with colour, music and dance.  We've already had the fayre pass through, the bonfire night to mark the summer solstace and the music festival and have so much more to look forward to.....14th July, the wool, felt and tapestry festival ( I live in Felletin, next to Aubusson, in the Limousin and well known around the world for it's tapestry industries ), the Folklore festival, lots of village festivals where they celebrate anything and everything including apples and donkey's, he he he.

Button Fayre's been so incredibly busy this year which has been an amazingly huge step for it's future and plans are well underway to further evolve, bring you lots of brand new cushion designs, amongst lots of other goodies of course, start writing a lot more regularly on the blogs, write a book about crafting in France and the whole artisan community, and working out more of a tight work schedule now that my little twins are actually not so little anymore and will be turning four at the end of the year.
I also really want to set up a special Button Fayre crafting chat page on Facebook which I think could be quite useful within the crafting community.  I often want to know where I could get something in particular, or know how to finish off a certain project and I'm sure we all have these questions and so what better place than a virtual tea and cake crafting room?  Yay I think!

Things are running at full speed right now and I've been completing cushion orders and am currently working on a giant table cloth for a beautiful French farm house that's being renovated ( not mine unfortunately ).   The design's patchwork but each square is around 60cm x 58cm and there are 24 of them, yes 24!!  I'm going to do the appliqué work on each square before I even attempt to sew the whole thing together, for obvious reasons, and hope to have it all complete in the next week or so.

The summer market night is approaching fast and will be held on Button Fayre's Facebook page on 25th July....I can't believe we're the 1st of July already today.....and you can find all details in the link below, just give it a click.

https://www.facebook.com/ButtonFayre

There will be lots of gorgeous goodies up for grabs on the night, all ( as usual ) at promotional prices too and I'm busy designing two or three exclusive cushions too which is very exciting.






We have temperatures in the mid to late 30's at present and it's very, very hot.  My freezer is packed full of ice pops to keep us cool and I really can't wait for the holiday's to get going now, it's quite a magical time of the year here and I do love sitting in my studio with the window open, listening to the music in the street on market day and the people laughing.




I kind of have two gardens.  You walk outside onto this lovely old pathway, follow it around and then stumble upon my ' secret ' garden.  I called it this because when I bought the house 7 years ago it was all overgrown and hidden away and once I'd started cutting it all back I kept finding incredible things like wild strawberries and elderflower!  I lined the edge in a hiccledey piccledey fashion with old stones et voila, a lovely border to plant my flowers every year and this year I've chosen petunia's and geraniums.  
Once you walk through into the large garden things become really magical as it's full of fruit trees, blackberry bushes, bay leaves, grapes, walnuts and noisettes.  Aren't I lucky?!

Enjoy the start of your summer,

Lucy x