Hoppy Easter everybunny

With such a warm March day it would have been wasteful not to spend it in the garden and so I took a break from making robins and hares. Having just acquired a second greenhouse I have been busy potting on seedlings and planting salad crops. The dunnocks, robins and blue tits were all busily chatting about their day and with the soft breeze lifting the smell of hyacinth it really was a true Spring morning.

Moon Gazing Hares have been really popular since I launched them exactly a year ago but I have only just introduced the larger hare. Last Autumn I collected lavender from an extra garden to allow for successful hares and having just stripped all of the flowers from the stalks of last season's lavender I knew I had enough to make the bigger hares. They too have been a great success. I will shortly start making some ivory coloured hares with green knitted scarves and a little jingle bell ready for the Christmas market in September. (I like to have June, July and August off so I have to be Christmas ready by the end of May, well, fully stocked at least with my Christmas best sellers.

I am really pleased with my new card designs, and with this sunflower I used a photo of the moon for the centre of the flower. This design is really lovely, left blank for any sentiment and scented with a sultry cypress scent. I may lower the little bee charm so it sits in the centre rather than slightly hidden within the petals. These photos show how the design developed.

I have been helping some local ladies in the village set up their Etsy shops, and we have had great fun creating identities, shop names and signature colours and themes. Lunabelle & Ivy was a complete logo design, from how the cats should sit to the placement of the poppy flowers. Once the drawing had been decided upon I then made several drafts placing the wording in different places and with different border boundaries.

There were a few other trials with the final choice being delicate, creative and very cute. I'm really pleased with this logo, it stands out with a harmonious balance and has a unique identity which would stand the test of time as the shop develops and expands. Designing a logo is such a big, important task as it needs to be perfect from the off so there is never a need to change it.

The second logo for Aileni Gems was a complete rebrand, but it was an easy task as the brief had clear requirements. This Celtic tree logo came to me as a stock photo and so we went to work creating a brand to suit the wares. We represented the chakras down the trunk of the tree, maybe an obvious thing to do but adding the white edge to the coloured dots and having the writing look like it sits behind the tree has created a really sweet logo. The font I was asked to use is perfect as the 'A' has a shape that also appears within the tree branches. It was such great fun doing something new beyond the boundaries of my usual crafting.

I have had some great fun decorating some really cheap, in-need-of-a-facelift wooden chairs that my good friend Zoe found for me. I used a sage green paint to cover their roughness and accented them with bright bohemian colours to match our kitchen. We had been using garden chairs and finally got fed up enough to do something about it.

I really like the yarn wrap on the chair above with a fabulous slab of wood as the seat and really like the relief detail of the chair below, lightly dry brushed and highlighted with white. The seat came with Pagan pentagram holes already drilled and so I took advantage to sew a design into it. It's quite sweet in real life but really comes into its own when it's in situ with the bright kitchen colours and the other unmatching chairs, all painted differently.

The next venture for my Etsy shop is to make some wall hanging Christmas trees. I have seen the idea on Etsy already, but they are really expensive and not very creative. I have an idea that I haven't seen before and so I'm a little secretive about it until it is listed. I'll use my colour skills to hopefully produce some really rustic, unique trees. I am currently doing the math so my trees have an aesthetic shape with its width, height and the gap between branches being mathematically balanced. They will be at least 150 cm long and some will be slightly smaller to hang on a door for people with limited space.

Anyway, Hoppy Easter everybunny. Everything is sailing along, lots of new ideas and things to try. I can't wait for a decent Summer to loll around the garden studying the plants and I have a shelf of books to read and catch up on.

Ostara blessings, stay warm, happy and safe!

(I just got these new carrot and bunny charms for Easter cards. They are super cute, check them out!)