The journal you are looking for is The Eternal Magpie.
That's where I talk about sewing and knitting and all the pretty things I'm making at the moment.


This is my personal journal, where I talk about my personal battles with endometriosis and IBS, amongst other things. It is mostly filled with me whingeing about being ill, and what I'm currently attempting to do about it. This is not terribly interesting to anyone who isn't me.

When I'm not too busy being ill, I talk about knitting. A lot.

I'm self-employed as a dressmaker.



If you should be feeling particularly generous and inclined to buy me a gift, my Wish List is here.

If you're on my friends list and need to get in touch with me, my contact details are here.

My mental and physical health are Not Good, and they're getting worse.

I don't think 116 people really need to read all about it, and I'm not keeping up with all of those journals anyway, so I'm having a bit of a chopping-down of the reading list.

If you've been looking for a polite way to stop reading my LJ, now's the time to remove me from your list too.



If you were only here for the sewing, see also eternalmagpie, eternal_magpie, or Eternal Magpie.



If you'd prefer the Real Life potted version, please feel free to add me on Facebook instead.

The Fashion Show took place at Whitby in November 2003. Unfortunately, somewhere in the switch between PC and Mac, I can't find any of my archived photos of the occasion!

If you have any, please can you let me know where to find them, or email them to me? (claire@designbyclaire.co.uk) I don't want to use them for commercial purposes - GothStuff has long since closed down. I'd like to keep them for my own records though, and for those who took part.

If you can help at all, I'd love to hear from you!

Yes, he’s back – the triumphant return of the Littlest Elder God!

We have an extremely Limited Edition of just twenty-four Baby Cthulhu t-shirts now available.

If your size isn’t shown in the store, that means we’ve run out. Sorry about that, but Baby Cthulhu’s quite popular, despite his unfortunate habit of wreaking insanity wherever he goes.

If you’d like to pre-order a t-shirt to be printed in our next batch, please let us know! We need a minimum of twelve orders before we can print more, so we can’t guarantee how long you’ll have to wait.


Click to buy Baby Cthulhu t-shirts!

Right!

As the GothStuff domain names will expire at the end of this month, I thought it would be a good time to have one last GothStuff Crazy Closing Down Sale!

All of the remaining t-shirts, hoodies and net skirts have now been listed on Ebay.

Every item starts at just 99p!

Items also have a "Buy It Now" price, so you can snap up the ones you really want immediately, without getting into a bidding war!

The auctions last for seven days, and that's it.
No re-listing, no second chance offers, nothing. At the end of the week, GothStuff is gone.

Okay, this time I really mean it. I am going to place an order with Bishopston Trading, before they run out of their Autumn/Winter colours!

You can see the colours here, but the page might take a while to load.

The fabric is 122cm wide (slightly narrower than mass-produced fabric), and each piece is 18-19 metres long.
It's a lightweight cotton, similar to a shirting weight.

For an 18-19 metre piece, I am asking for £60.
For half a piece (approximately 9 metres), I am asking for £30.

These prices cover the cost of the fabric, VAT, shipping from India to Bristol to me, and then onwards from me to you.

Please be aware that it can take up to three months for the fabric to arrive from India.

So far, I have people interested in the following:

sigrid_stallard
½ piece Unbleached
½ piece Damson
½ piece Lapiz
½ piece Mallard
Total: 4 x ½ pieces = £120

feanelwa
½ piece Chinablue
Total: 1 x ½ piece = £30

ewtikins
½ piece Damson
½ piece Lapiz
½ piece Grape
½ piece Wine
½ piece Black
Total: 5 x ½ pieces = £150

Me!
½ piece Grape
½ piece Wine
½ piece Black
½ piece Unbleached
½ piece Mallard
½ piece Chinablue
1 piece Raspberry

I will require payment in advance - as soon as possible after the order has been confirmed.


Any more for any more?
Let me know, and I'll place the order this afternoon!

After ooh, about three years of going on about it, I am finally going to place an order with Bishopston Trading!

I need to place an order for a minimum of four 20-metre pieces of their fair trade organic cotton, so I'd like to do a little opinion poll to see which colours people actually like.

I've only listed the plain colours, because I don't have any exciting ideas of things to make from the stripes or checks. If you really like any of them, please feel free to say so in the comments.

You can see the colour chart here...

Poll #1050588 Bishopston Fabrics, Summer 2007
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Please tick as many colours as you fancy...

More colours...

If anyone would like to buy pieces of this fabric from me once it arrives, I'll be asking for £5 a metre, plus postage.

If anyone would like to join me on this order and buy a 20-metre length, the price per piece is £44 + VAT + shipping.

It's right at the end of the season for the Spring/Summer colours, so it's possible that some of these may no longer be available. If that's the case, I might be asking you all over again when the Autumn/Winter colours are released next month.

Also, it could take up to three months for the fabric to arrive (depending on whether it's in the UK already, or whether they need to ship more across from India), so this is not something to go for if you're in a hurry!


[edit] Don't forget that you can express an opinion on the colours, even if you have no intention of ever buying anything I might make from the fabric! ;)

I just wanted to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who's bought t-shirts from GothStuff over the past four years.

The Baby Horrors have almost all gone, we just have five left, all in baby sizes:



Rubber Duckie age 0-6 months
Rubber Duckie age 12-18 months
Rubber Duckie age 18-24 months
Ghost, age 12-18 months
Rubber Duckie age 4-6 years

If anyone would like to snap up these last four, they're £1.50 each, including UK p&p.
(PayPal to claire@gothstuff.com)

For the next ten days, all of the Second Skin t-shirts are HALF PRICE in the GothStuff Ebay Shop.

Once this sale is finished, we will be reducing the GothStuff, Little Heroes and Chemical Generation t-shirts in turn, until everything's gone.

We are still selling the t-shirt printing kit, if anyone's interested in that...


Once again, I'd like to say a HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who's supported us, and I hope you'll continue to be supportive of our future adventures. Thank you!

Assuming I've pressed all the right buttons, there will shortly be a SALE in the GothStuff Ebay Shop.

As of midday, all of the Remarkable recycled stationery should be half price.

The sale lasts for two weeks only, so grab a bargain while you can!

If we were thinking about licensing the Baby Horrors or Little Heroes designs for manufacture and distribution by another company, how would we go about it? Where would we start?

Any links to helpful information (or helpful people!) would be very much appreciated.

If you don't want to leave comments here, you can send email to claire@gothstuff.com.

Please feel free to link this post far and wide, if you think it will help!

I've just added the knitting page in to the Design By Claire website.

I'm not taking on any new sewing orders until the end of February, but I'm more than happy to take on orders for badges, or knitting commissions. Given how cold the weather's been lately, does anybody fancy a nice warm hat and scarf? ;)

People at work (okay, evisceracat) are starting to develop their own Valentine's Day displays. So, of course, I want to put together a display of Valentine's knitting and crochet books. My colleagues keep looking at me as though I've gone mad, so I need to make this good!

We already have The Happy Hooker, Sexy Little Knits and Glamour Knits.

I was thinking of maybe ordering in Domiknitrix and Naughty Needles, as we don't have those yet.


So... what have I missed?

Which books would you recommend, for romantic, sexy or just plain gorgeous knitting?
What would you like to see on such a display?

I'd be really grateful for your suggestions. Thank you!



In Other Knitting News (because I'm sure you were dying to know), I've finished both of the stripey sleeves on my pirate jumper, and have just done the ribbing for the back. I need to count rows carefully as I knit the back, so that I can work out where to place the chart on the front. The chart I'm knitting is a bit different from the one in the pattern. (The pattern chart says to knit a heart. I'm knitting a skull. Of course.)

I worked out a pattern in my head today which should hopefully result in a Point 5 ribbed jumper which doesn't make the wearer look like a heffalump, which is always a danger with such thick yarn. I have a theory that if I knit it on circular needles I should be able to construct the whole thing in one piece, but I might have to cheat and seam the sleeves. It'll have to go on the "wait and see" pile though, as I have a box of yarn under the bed which is jammed full of goodies, and I can't afford to buy a whole jumper's worth of Point 5 or Big Wool just at the moment.

Can anybody give me a good reason why I shouldn't sew up the seams of my pirate jumper on the sewing machine? (Apart from "it's bloody lazy", I know that one already.) I know I'm a seamstress and all, but I hate seaming knitting, and the machine is just sitting there...

Calling All Sewing Types...

I am having a clear out of sewing patterns.

First come, first served.

Many are free!

Paul and I have just been looking at the statistics for the GothStuff website over the past couple of months. It turns out that taking your website down is a really good way of finding out who's been stealing your images.

Although I closed down the website between December 19th and January 2nd (literally deleting all the pages so people couldn't place orders via pages which had been cached), I left the image directories in place so that my Ebay auctions would continue to work.

Except that the images which were visited the largest number of times, weren't the ones in my Ebay auctions. It seems as though one (or several) of our Little Heroes images are being used as someone's profile icon on the Finnish version of MySpace, and literally sucking our bandwidth because of the amount of people seeing it. We can't find it, because a) we can't read Finnish, and b) we'd have to have an account and be logged it, but it's really bloody annoying. We wondered why on earth we were getting so many hits from Finland!

People on MySpace and Vampire Freaks are also stealing our images to use for their profile icons. Now I don't really mind people linking to images from my websites on their journals or their own sites - it's good advertising if people want to show our images to their friends. I don't even mind too much if people want to steal the images to use as icons. As long as they're not trying to pass our work off as their own, they're quite welcome to use the cute little pictures. (Credit would be nice, but hey. It's the internet. Who am I kidding?) But hotlinking straight to our images, especially from a site like MySpace which generates a heck of a lot of traffic, is a bit of a problem.



You know what's the most galling thing? The images which are the most stolen are not even the same ones that people are buying the damn t-shirts of. We've sold about hardly any of our Pirate t-shirt range, and the bandwidth being eaten by the Little Heroes images is absolutely phenomenal.



*sigh*



Please don't steal bandwidth, people.

If you're going to be using an image a lot, even if you're nicking it from someone else, please at least have the common sense to save it to your own damn server first.

This year our customary January Sale is taking place on Ebay! All of the Baby Horrors t-shirts listed in the GothStuff Ebay Shop are now half price.



You can also find GothStuff in the following places...

• Everything in the GothStuff Ebay Shop is available immediately, and can be shipped out within a day or two of purchase. All of the Baby Horrors t-shirts on Ebay are now half price!
  


• You can also check out the GothStuff LiveJournal for regular updates and pieces for sale.
  


• I am gradually adding pieces to the GothStuff Etsy Store, so you can also shop there. Currently available is a selection of jewellery at bargain prices!
  


• There is a gallery of my bespoke dressmaking projects on the Design By Claire website.

Does anybody know what's the best thing to do with a minibus which is about to be written off?

Details are here.

If any of you can offer ephemera a bit of advice, that would be really helpful.



Thank you!

Dear Friends List,

I hope that the vast majority of you are enjoying your hangovers and general over-indulgence of yesterday, while a sad few of us go to work.

One. Day. Off.
(And yes, I am well aware that nurses and policemen and firemen and ambulance drivers and all manner of care workers didn't even have that.)

But one day off. One day.

I must confess that in past years Paul and I have really enjoyed wandering round the shops on Boxing Day, maybe picking up a few bits in the sales, and then going to the cinema in the afternoon.

From now on, I will not be going shopping on Boxing Day. Eventually, surely, if nobody goes shopping, then perhaps the shops won't find it worth being open, and then maybe the people who work in them can have an outrageous two whole days off. Shocking.

I know this won't actually work, because there will always be people trying to go shopping. The supermarkets are open 24 hours; I had to send Paul to the petrol station for medicine on Christmas Eve, and thank goodness it was available.

But surely, people are not so traumatised by the enforcement of a single day of not being able to go shopping that they feel the desparate urge to descend in ravening hordes on Boxing Day? Are they? I, for one, haven't got any money left. It doesn't matter how cheap things are in the sales, I can't afford it anyway. And if I didn't need something on Christmas Eve at full price, do I really need it on Boxing Day just because it's reduced?

I would bet money on the fact that all I will be doing today is giving refunds on all the unwanted items which were bought in a last-minute thoughtless frenzy on Christmas Eve.

Consumer culture in this country has gone completely mad.