Family Reward Chart

I'm in the middle of a commission for a 'Family Reward Chart' big enough to accommodate enough stars for 3 children plus one adult, so that's an amazing 48 golden stars! I love the idea of of a chart which gets the whole family involved so I've made one for our family too which includes a column each for 'Mummy' and 'Daddy'...I'll let you know how it works

Felt Phonics

Recently I've had the great pleasure of making a Felt Phonics Folder (great tongue twister) for Kristin, a speech pathologist who I met through Kids Spot. Kristin asked me to make the folder in wipe clean fabric so she could use it with the children she works with without worrying about sticky fingers! (good thinking). She provided me with a list of the most high frequency letters/sounds and I came up with some felt 'scenes' for her to use to encourage the children to use the sounds like 'sh', 's', and 'th'. I added a wipe clean bag to the set to help keep things together, although I think it would be more useful if the folder fitted into the bag too, I'll try that out next time. It's definitely a work in progress and I'll keep you posted, it's such an exciting project.

Japanese Tea Party

Towards the end of last year my last commission in the UK (before the big move to Australia) was for a Japanese client. She wanted a fully upholstered doll's house for her daughter to take back to Japan and asked if I could embroider the family name on the front so that they could keep it as an heirloom for generations to come. This was a very special project for me as we were also good friends and would soon be parting ways. We spent many coffee mornings together choosing fabrics whilst our children played and we discussed the design. At the end of the project she very kindly asked me over to a friend's house to share a real Japanese tea morning. I was enchanted by the careful presentation of the food and table. We had a delicious green tea cake with sweet aduki bean sauce and cream, it has a very delicate almost fragrant flavour with a light consistency similar to a souffle. I felt a little bashful at the thought of my very English tea and biscuits I had served at my house, and on one occasion I had baked a tray of flapjacks that had ended up as a heap of crumbs much to everyone's amusement!