The great $7 sale

There's a sale in my shop! Check it out here.

Most of the items would make great Christmas decorations, so you could stock up for Christmas. Or you could maybe brighten up your house with the suncatchers, bringing a little summer sun indoors.



Or add a little humour to your outfit with my Spidey pendant.



7 is a lucky number, so why not get lucky at my $7 sale!

Toadstool Footstool and Fuzzy Bats

A couple of weeks ago I got this gorgeous item from the lovely Esme of PaisleyChainsaw, EsmeArt and StyleMissile:



It's a Toadstool Footstool, made for the UK Etsy Challenge, and Esme kindly gave it to me for FREE! Yays :)

I have bought many things from her supplies store:





and recently I was her 100th customer there, so I got fabulous freebies:



Bless her, it's a wonder she makes any money giving away all this free stuff :D

I also wish to pimp a couple of other UK Etsians I've bought things from lately. First up is geegaw.etsy.com, from whom I bought these gorgeous jewel-coloured glass beads:



Also check out her other shop, gugaw.etsy.com from which I bought one of my favourite pairs of earrings:



I love silver, and I love roses, so these are perfect :)

I've been wanting to use felt beads in my work for a while, and finally took the plunge with a 25 bead taster pack from BigFish.etsy.com:



I also got free beads and buttons, yay! BigFish is the colourful, ethical supplies shop of the lovely Kirsty Fish (probably not her real name), and she also runs PaperFish (more colourful goodness) and SnowFish (Christmas goodness).

The new material deserved a new design, and I've created something a little more minimal than my usual work. Here's what I've made with the felt beads so far:





These little winged furballs are called Fuzzy Bats, and are for sale here.

Thanks for reading, and happy shopping!

Looking forward to autumn

Rather than wanting the funny weather we've been having lately to go back to proper summer, I seem to be in the odd position of wanting it to get colder. At the moment, in the house at least, I'm trying to keep warm, which puts me in mind of cosy yet stylish clothes. I want it to be autumn so that I can wear my little tartan skirt with opaque tights and a big chunky cardi, or snuggle up in similarly lovely warm clothes, such as the two H&M cord jackets I now own (one's a rich purple, the other's a mossy green, in case you wondered). This is partly the fault of fashion magazines such as Elle. I'm reading all about a/w fashions, my favourite being Goth of course, and wanting to wear them all.

I love this photoshoot from Elle:



I love tartan, and the way they've styled it there is great. Dark, playful and glamorous all at the same time.

I read a lot of fashion mags and sometimes the fashion does not inspire me. I'm not really a dedicated follower of fashion, so the fact that summer's all-in-ones and nauticals didn't interest me was not really a problem. But when what I see in those glossy pages strikes a chord, I'm all over it. I'm loving this new Dark Romance trend. That kind of feminine-with-a-hard-edge look that says Goth to me is one of the strongest themes that runs through my work, so the fact that this look is in fashion is a bit of a bonus.

I've dedicated a large chunk of my moodboard to this new, darker mood in fashion:





Inspired by this, I have created this Gothic Rose charm necklace:



I love the combination of black and red, as it always looks striking. Plastic stars and skulls add a bit of fun to the piece, while a vintage Lucite rose adds a little old-fashioned romance. Find it for sale here.

For more Gothic pieces, search Goth in my shop. Also, for more work from my fellow Dark Side members and myself, search etsydarkteam on Etsy.

Thank you for reading.