Wow.. what a few weeks (months?!) we have had. We were so lucky to be able to go to Disneyworld Florida with my Dad, where we all had the best time! But we did really miss you all, and it has been lovely to come back and get stuck back into things with lots of ideas!

It has been a busy week juggling work, school, clubs, orders (thank you!!) and finishing off stock to take to Yarndale, but it will all be worth it!! We have two tables this year so will be able to squeeze even more things in with us than last year. We also have a couple of products that we haven’t had time to list but have made enough to bring with us so keep an eye out for those. These include some new stitch markers and engraved pencils!

We did promise some things as a thank you for being patient with us for being away for three weeks. Until the end of September, all orders of £10 (pre delivery for overseas orders) or more will receive a free blank crochet hook. We did also promise a giveway, but with the sad news of the passing of Queen Elizabeth and the subsequent national mourning, we have respectfully delayed this. We will be busy at Yarndale this weekend, and also looking forward to going to Bakewell Wool Gathering in a few weeks, so we promise that we will be doing this as soon as we have time!!

So lots to look out for – Yarndale, Bakewell Wool Gathering, new products at Yarndale (soon to be added online too), and a giveaway in the next few weeks! If you are coming to Yarndale or Bakewell please do come and visit us and say hello! Rich will be there both days at Yarndale, and I will be there Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday. We are really looking forward to meeting lots of you who we know online in real life, so come along and introduce yourselves, and we hope you have a fab time too!

As promised, a blog!

Not many photos in this one, but a bit of a general update, some dates for your diary, and some thanks too!

We are having so much fun with the boys being off. We are both at our day jobs (needing to save annual leave for our upcoming holiday!) but they have lots of fun at Grandads, holiday club, and of course our evenings and long weekends. They love being busy and sociable, and Laurence has finally cracked riding a bike at a day dedicated to teaching just that! On top of that, I have some uni work due in over the next few weeks (wish me luck!!), and we are also tackling freshening up the paintwork in our house. It is long overdue, but we are slowly but surely getting there, and I feel so much better as each room is sorted and painted.

We are also working on some ideas in the background. At Yarndale last year we were asked a few times about sock blockers. We have looked into this but we just don’t know enough about them yet to make sure we are making the best type, so this idea is on the back burner. We are however currently making sock rulers! We have made a few prototypes to see how they come out. Now we just need to make some tweaks and hopefully they will soon be ready to be listed. We are also working on “wraps per inch” tools and yarn weight gauges, amongst a few other things! Not to forget of course pricing up our acrylic hearts which were really popular on a post recently. These will definitely be listed soon, we just need to price these but we are busy getting out all your orders as quickly as we can first.

Dates for your diary –

We will be closing on Friday 19^th August as my Dad and his wife are generously taking us to Disney World!! This feels so much more real now we are in August and we can’t wait. We will close our Etsy and website on Friday 19^th, and all personalisation’s will need to be confirmed by Saturday 20^th August. From Sunday 21^st, all orders will be made and posted, and our out of office’s on until we return…. on Thursday 8^th September! We understand this is a long time, and we are so grateful for your patience and understanding. To thank you for this, we will be doing something exciting when we return… probably a give away but maybe something else too so watch this space!

Some more dates: we will be at Yarndale again this year which is the 24-25 September and we are so excited for this. We are also excited to be attending Bakewell Wool Gathering for the first time, which is 8-9 October. We would love to see you there so please do come and say Hi! I am terrible with faces, so please don’t be offended but do introduce yourself, and if I look a bit blank let me know your “Instagram name”!!

And finally… I can’t post this blog without giving my sincere thanks. I am on quite a few facebook groups related to crochet and crafts, and absolutely love seeing other’s makes. There’s a few that I sometimes post on but don’t usually get a huge response, and that’s okay. I get that people don’t want to see selling posts and I too sometimes get lazy at engaging with posts because there are just so many! But, I can only say again how overwhelmed we are at the response that my post got on two crochet pages yesterday. Rich is doing extra nights in the workshop to keep up with orders which is amazing, and ultimately what enables us to keep doing this which we love. As well as that though, the comments, likes, follows are feedback were amazing and so heart-warming. It was so lovely to hear too from those of you who know us and have ordered from us sharing your feedback too. We all know social media can be challenging, and goodness knows what pleases the Instagram algorithms(!), but to receive so much engagement was amazing. So, thank you all for all your love and support.

Naturally we also need to thank my Dad and his wife Jo here, as without their generosity we wouldn’t be going away on our big holiday this year. We are so excited, and the boys are too but I don’t think they can really comprehend how exciting it will be when we are there!! We are eternally grateful and excited to be going on this once in a lifetime holiday. We are so fortunate to have a small but well formed support network of family and friends, which we are truly grateful for, and we do also need to mention my Mum and Step-Dad here too. My Mum was my biggest cheerleader, and Richards too, and she had such faith in what he could achieve. She also supported all his kickstarters (despite not really understanding them!!) which enabled him to buy his laser cutter initially and was so proud of what he achieved. She knew that he would be able to launch his own business, and although she sadly died before the business really became what it is today, she would be so proud of us and we are so grateful for her never-wavering support which gave us the confidence to make the decisions we did, to get us where we are today. My stepdad Dave remains a big part of our life and a huge support, especially with our two boys. They all have so many adventures together, I don’t know how he keeps up with them!!

So, as I sit here making more stitch marker cards than you can shake a stick at whilst Rich makes and packs your orders, thank you, for making this possible for us.

Eeek, despite good intentions it’s been a while, sorry!! I often think about updating here, but sometimes I’m not sure what to write, or what you would be interested in hearing! So tonight’s update is going to be a bit about us, and a bit of a sneak preview at a little project I’ve just started.

I know the hot weather isn’t for everyone, but I am loving it! How are you finding it? I was planning on catching up with my uni work this weekend. As I work it has to be squeezed in on evenings and weekends, but, we all needed to blow away the cobwebs and so we went to the beach instead! The weather was of course beautiful, the boys loved playing on the beach and in the sea, and naturally we had to have ice creams afterwards. My uni work still got done that evening, and we got to have a lovely day by the sea too.

We also heard the news this weekend that our lovely friends had a beautiful baby blue, so I need to make them something. Its a bit hot for a blanket, but at least they can’t be outgrown! As I’ve nearly finished my ice-cream coloured blanket I pictured on the beach and I know there’s plenty of yarn left, I’ve picked out some of the colours and added white:

And inspired by my previous blanket I made using the Dune Kit colours from Attic24’s beautiful kit, I will be making a granny square with white inbetween the colours. Here’s the dune kit one I did:

So I hope you are all having good weeks, and I hope that it gets hot enough for me to use the all the warm colours in my temperature blanket over the next few days!!

I was at uni today, and although completely unrelated to my day-job, had a lesson on blogging which I thought was quite apt!! I’ve been meaning to write this post for a few days, so this prompted me to finally get round to doing it.

I’ve had an idea in mind for a while to display my yarn tags but I couldn’t quite think how I wanted to do this. I’ve been pondering and then finally figured out what I wanted to do. So it was time to get making! Firstly, I asked Rich to engrave some yarn tags for me. This bit was easy, I knew that I wanted them to say “Oh I do like to be beside the seaside”, because it is absolutely my happy place. I love to go there and blow away the cobwebs, and it has definitely inspired the decor in the spare room. And since we have recently starting engraving yarn pegs, I though that these would be perfect to make a peg board with, engraved with the seaside themed images that we usually put on our seaside themed stich markers!

I then got out my yarn that reminded me of the seaside! I had lots of this from various projects, so narrowed it down and got wrapping my tags and pegs, using hot glue to secure the ends.

Here they are about midway through! After they were all wrapped, I then needed a blank background for my frame to put them in. I didn’t have paper big enough, but I did have wrapping paper! So I used this to wrap around the backing board. For the strings that my pegs sit on, I just crocheted two lengths, and used hot glue and sellotape to secure them at the back.

Super simple! I then hot glued the tags into place on the front. This is a close up of it all put together:

And here it is in place with these cute fairy lights that I got for a bargain £3 in the sale! I’m really pleased with how it turned out. A place to peg my notes, and another way to use some of my yarn tags too! I hope you’re all enjoying whatever crafty things you are making at the moment too!

Hi! Sorry it’s been a while, we’ve had a lot going on and a lot of bugs going around our house so haven’t been feeling our best! Fortunately we are all looking a bit brighter now, and we have a bit of an update to give too.

Rich will shortly be returning to having a “day job”. We have loved his stint of self-employment, and it has enabled him to build LauretteCraftsUK to where it is today, something that we just could not have done whilst he was working.  That said, we also have to be sensible with our family to support and ever-rising bills to pay, and so Rich will shortly be retuning to work.

This will naturally impact on LauretteCraftsUK, but hopefully not too much. We ran if for a while whilst Rich worked full time, and we are now established which will help us to continue with it whilst we both work. We will this time however only be processing orders twice a week – on a Monday evening and on a Friday. In-between this time, we will answer queries and design personalised orders as able, but we will only routinely process and post orders twice a week. We will also continue to create new items and have lots more ideas of new things to add to our range 😊

So that’s it for our update for now – we will be closing on the bank holidays and then our new processing days will be in place from Monday 6^th June. I hope you all enjoy the bank holidays, and I will try not to leave it so long between blog posts!

Can you believe we have another bank holiday weekend!? I don’t know about you, but after a busy few weeks we are ready for another extra day off 🙂

We had a fab time over Easter. We were lucky enough to have some time off altogether and went camping with our friends. We had the absolute best time, it was just what we all needed – long days by the beach, soaking up the sun (in our coats, but poetic license allowed!), and recharging ready for real life! It was lovely to watch the boys play with their friends whilst we caught up with ours, and already have our next trip booked. We are hopeless at family photos though- here’s the only one I can find, which happens to have been taken on the greyest day we had!

When we came back it was a busy few days finishing preparing and then off to Wonderwool Wales for Rich! I was home with the boys but loved seeing and hearing what he was up to – I know he got to meet some of you that we know via Instagram/Facebook which is always lovely, as well as meet some new faces.

And in a few weeks time we will be off to Wool@J13 which is quite local to us, so although I will be looking after the boys, I will be able to pop down and help out/have a wander at some point so I am very excited for this one too! Hopefully some of you can meet us there 🙂

One of #Marchmeetthemakers prompts was “A day in the life of”, which then got me thinking about our products and the entire process from start to finish. So if you’re interested, here’s a bit of a peek behind the scenes!

So, first of all, we need an idea! I’m going to show you an engraved shade card. The idea of this came about because we had a few people asking how they could make our shade cards reusable. Crocheting and our other crafty hobbies are fun, and the aim of all of our makes is to be things that are going to be useful and help you have even more fun. By having Yarn A etc, this correlates with a lot of patterns and means that once a project has been completed, you can simply take the yarn off and change it to whatever colours you are using for your next project! For those of you that haven’t used a shade card before, they are used so that when you are completing a project with multiple colours of yarn, and have discarded the colours from the balls of yarn, you can still easily identify them by comparing the swatch on your shade card to your yarn ball!

Once we have an idea, it then needs to be designed! Rich has extensive experience using the software needed from his previous full time jobs over the past approx. 15 years, and so this is where he steps in! This item didn’t need as much design work as we had previously done all the design and prototyping and improving for the blank and personalised shade cards, so for these we just needed to decide on a title and put the text on.

Once he has brought the item up on his laptop and it is ready to cut, he turns on the laser cutter. This is serviced/cleaned weekly, then before each cut he makes sure that its all properly aligned. Then he presses go and it does its thing (at least that’s what it looks like from where I sit!!). He has to watch it at all times as due to the nature of it, there is a risk of fire.

Once the laser has finished, Rich takes it off the laser bed and on to the next part of the process. Most of our items (including our shade cards) are wiped and sanded, to ensure that they look their best when they come to you.

The next part depends on what we are doing with the item. If it is that this is a test item, then we will make any necessary changes. Once it is perfected, we then need to work out a cost. This is sooo hard! We keep our prices as low as we possibly can, but it is difficult with the rising prices of most things. As well as needing to cover the cost of materials, cutting/engraving, packaging and postage, we also need to cover things like listing and selling fees, as well as rent, utilities and other things like upkeep of the laser and fees associated with the software used, plus of course enough for Rich to take a wage as this is his main income now! Once this has been worked out, we then need to photograph and list the item on Etsy and our website. If it is that this item is for an order, then its straight to the fun bit – packaging! Once it is packaged, Richard generates the postage label, and takes it to the post office!

My part in the process aside from ideas, is to put the item to use to make sure it works. My other role is social media, so I get to post on our Insta/FB pages. I love this side of things and have made so many friends through it. It’s also how I can show you all of our things. I get so excited when we have new things to share, and also love when you have ideas for us too! So do let me know if there’s anything else that you would like us to make 😊 and I look forward to sharing our next ideas with you!

Happy Mother’s Day! It’s a funny day for us here as my Mum passed away far to soon in November 2020. I cope by keeping busy – last year I picked up an extra shift so that I was busy at work… this year I’ll be painting the fence in the garden! I think it can be an emotive day for lots of people for lots of reasons, but I will be spending today grateful that I have my boys, and we always talk about Grandma so we will be remembering her as always. Here’s some pictures of my Mum, and some of her with my boys too that she got to spend lots of time with.

And here’s my plug to get yourself checked out if you have any health worries. My mum was diagnosed six years prior with Ovarian Cancer and was so fortunate to receive the best care from our fantastic NHS which enabled her to live for as long as possible. We were both grateful that she got to meet both my boys and have lots of fun with them, and they both talk about her. She was an amazing person, and truly my best friend. She had lots of treatment, and so naturally some times were really tough, but she always looked on the bright side. We had some amazing times, and lots and lots of normal moments that are so often taken for granted, things like just sitting and watching tele together, or going for a hot chocolate! I remember reading that grief is like having a box inside you, and in that box is a ball. At the start, the ball is really big and it touches the sides often, and that’s when the grief really hits you. As time goes on, the ball is smaller, and it still hits the sides sometimes, but less often, although sometimes without warning. It’s a description that really resonated with me and still does, although I know it won’t be the same for everyone. Here’s a few more pics, just because its Mother’s Day and why not!

So I hope that you all have the best days that you can, hug your loved ones, and for those of you that are Mums, that you are thoroughly spoilt!!

I posted recently my Dune Kit makes, and got lots of questions about what I had made so I thought it would be a really good premise for this blog post!

So, the Attic24 patterns by Lucy were some of the first “real” patterns I followed after I learnt the basics. I love how clear and simple they are, but they look so effective! Beautifully written and accompanied by so many photographs, they are fab. The kit I absolutely fell in love with though was the Dune kit which I bought from Wool Warehouse and contains Stylecraft DK Yarns. Naturally, first thing first, was making up my Yarn Tags and shade card!

Once these were ready, on to the important task of making the blanket itself! At the time, I only really made baby blankets. I still love baby blankets as they work up so quickly, you get to move to the next idea and project really quickly! But, I do appreciate, that bigger blankets are more practical really, so I did the lap blanket size, which was the biggest I’d done at the time. I love a lap sized blanket now, plenty big enough but still don’t take too long. I love this blanket and we get lots of use out of it.

I’ve lost track of the order I made the other bits in, but I made all of these from the left over yarn from the kit, plus 1-2 100g balls of white yarn. I think a rouge neutral colour yarn cake got in at some point towards the end, but this was only tiny!

So I made some bunting – this was from a book I have on how to use up your leftover yarn called Crochet Stashbusters by Nicki Trench. I love making bunting, and stiffened it by simply using a 50:50 mix of water and clear PVA glue. I then dipped them in and squeezed them out, before pinning them on to a foam board (one of the boys play foam mats!) until they dried!

I also made lots of pom poms, and use hot glue to stick them to one of our wooden wreath bases, that I had painted cream.

Another thing I made was a basket which can be seen in the first picture. I used one of our basket bases, with three strands of yarn, swopping out on colour of yarn every few rows to give an ombre effect, and sewing pom poms on at the top.

I made a baby blanket which I love! It’s a granny square, using each of the 15 yarn shades from the kit once, with a row of white in between each colour. The border is my favourite, and it is just DC stitch all the way round, using again all the colours from the kit.

Finally, I made three cushion covers! I made one Attic24 blooming flower initially, backed with a plain circle The cushion inserts came in packs of two so I was obliged to create another cushion cover – this time I just did the plain circle front and back, one in a random pattern and the other from lighter to darker. For the little granny squares cushion cover, I used the Attic24 Join As You Go blog post, and copied the little squares from there too – I love how these look! For the back of this one, I used two strands of yarn, working a circle initially before turning it into a square!

And that’s everything I made! I did also make a few pumpkins back in October, I honestly can’t believe how much I managed to make from this kit! I absolutely love these colours along with Lucy at Attic24’s patterns and had so much fun with all these makes.

Hi! Hope you’ve all had a good few weeks. We recently enjoyed half term with our two boys, and have had some lovely days out since the weather isn’t quite as bad as it has been! I’ve been desperate for a run out to the seaside for ages, so really enjoyed our trip out to New Brighton.

I had a week of annual leave to use up before April, and so I am off this week! I am looking forward to relaxing and seeing friends, but am also having a few days in the workshop with Richard 😊 We often work together on an evening or weekend but it’s a novelty to spend the day together working.

This time is great for us to work on ideas together, where I can explain what I want, Rich can draw it up and then cut it. Being in the workshop means we can more quickly make any changes that we want to, speeding up the process. I also to get to help out in postage and packaging, a favourite job of mine!

We are also preparing for our upcoming market at Wonderwool Wales and we are so excited! Unfortunately, I shall be at home looking after the boys, but Rich will be there 😊 We are also going to have a play with the stand set up to make sure we are showing off everything to its best. Its so hard now our range has expanded to narrow down what to take, so that’s another job for this week! We have a few shows confirmed, and a few more that we have applied for. Confirmed so far is:

Wonderwool Wales: 23/4/22-24/4/22

Wool @ J13: 14/5/22-15/5/22

Hopefully we shall see some of you there! Just a brief blog today, back to work now, but hope you’re all having good weeks and I’ll be back with a longer blog soon 🙂