OK, so I may not have made it into Good Housekeeping’s gift guide, but the Swanky Maison Gift Guide features quite a few of my products (yep, including the save water drink wine plaque!)

There’s lots of fab ideas, with clickable links, so take a look now and kick off/complete* your Christmas shopping.

personalised tractor clock

*delete as appropriate, according to your level of seasonal organisation

Yes, it was slightly disappointing that Good Housekeeping magazine

good housekeeping magazine

asked for my save water drink wine wall plaque to be sent to them for photographing for their Christmas gift guide this month

save water drink wine

and then they didn’t use it.

good housekeeping gift guide

Does it make it any better that they called in over 1,000 gift items and used only 228?

Maybe.

I shall console myself with the fact that I may well have been inundated by orders for the wine plaques and would’ve been fed up to the back teeth of red wine without having touched a drop.

And they’re featuring more gifts next month, so perhaps I should keep my fingers well and truly crossed!

Meanwhile, my shop is still open for wine plaques and more – come and have a browse!

Welcome to the 14th Handmade Monday!   If you want to join in, you’re more than welcome and you’ll find the info at the bottom of this post.

This week for me has been many things:

1. a week of prepping for a fair (Warrington Market, which wasn’t quite as busy this time as previous times: I think possibly the Saturday of a bank holiday weekend turned out to be a slightly less-than-ideal choice of date and the migraine I was nursing didn’t help matters, either!  If you were there and I came across as a grump, I am sorry!)

prepping wine plaques

2. a week of making up bespoke designs (I’m not showing the whole plaque because it was a poem from a husband to his wife and I think it would feel intrusive to show the poetry).  The illustrations all related to the poem, this is just a corner of it…

teapot on a bespoke plaque

3. a week of many photo frame orders

photo frames awaiting painting

4. a week of weddings, Royal and otherwise

just married campervan canvas

5. and it’s definitely been a week of persuading this broody chicken that she’d be better off outside scratching with her friends than sitting on eggs that are never going to hatch.  How long does it take before they get the message?  Words of wisdom most welcome!

broody hen

What’s your week been like?  Pop your link below to join in with Handmade Monday, and link back in your blog post please. 

It really is that simple and helps us all to promote handmade and blog reading!  It’s a lot of fun too

I wanted to let you know about this auction that’s happening on Facebook in aid of Cancer Research UK. 

cancer research UK

There’s lots of goodies up for grabs!  It’s being organised by a jewellery maker, Lucie from Angels and Diamonds, so there’s lots of jewellery and even some custom designs in the auction.

Angels and Diamonds

The Important Bits:

Starts: Saturday 12^th March at 9am

Ends: Sunday 20^th March at 7pm

Where: www.facebook.com/angelsanddiamonds

Albums: cancer research auction

How it works:  On Lucie’s Facebook page, there is a photo album called Cancer Reseach UK Auction.  Each item up for auction is listed there (it will be updated every day until the start date). The starting bid price will be listed under the photo, as well as details of the item and who donated it.

Bids are to be made in increments of 50p and £’s and when the auction ends Lucie will contact each winner individually.

You’ll be able to bid for one of my save water drink wine plaques which will be part of the auction:

save water drink wine

Good luck, have fun bidding – and support an amazing organisation in the process.