Milomade

Dummy Jam on sale soon…

Milomade — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:54:51 +0000

Recently I blogged about making Jam for my friend Matt, for him to sell and raise money for a film he’s making. We’ve named it Dummy Jam as it takes after the man who inspired it – a deaf Scotsman name James Duthie, fondly known as Dummy Jim, who cycled to the Arctic Circle in 1951. It will be on sale at long last this weekend at the Doune the Rabbit Hole Festival and I’ve just designed the labels and printed them out.

Really chuffed with them and I couldn’t resist sticking them on the jars to see the finished product. What do you think?

The illustration is by Nick Currey and is an adapted version of the Dummy Jim logo used on the website.

There are 5 flavours of jam so far:

Raspberry Runny Raspberry [...]
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Buy direct from Milomade

Milomade — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:51:42 +0000

I spent some time last week adding a new shop to this website. I tried out lots of Wordpress e-commerce plugins and most of them were terrible, lacking severely in documentation and support and so impossible to implement. I then stumbled upon Ecwid and manage to set it up and style it in less that 2 days. The support is excellent and it’s so easy to use that I would definitely recommend it.

So I now have a shop. I still have a few niggly things to sort out, but most importantly I need to start adding products and will be spending most evenings this week doing just that, so keep checking back to see what’s been added.

This is a really exciting new venture for me and very necessary. I’ve been using Zibbet since the beginning of the year [...]
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Allan Peters

Milomade — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 08:00:29 +0000

Just found this really lovely illustration/print by Allan Peters on the Grain Edit website and I love it. It’s so cute. I gues I’m a bit partial to bicycles at the moment as the Tour de France is on every day and so I’ve got bicycles on the brain.

It’s dedicated to their very own baby to be and I think it’s lovely…

The colours are just perfect. You can see the artist making the print here – go see it getting ‘born’…

The Big Tent Festival

Milomade — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:38:04 +0000

Just a quick post to tell you about the Big Tent Fesitval which is on this coming weekend. It runs from Friday the 23rd July to Sunday the 25th July and is a jam packed weekend of fun and frolics set on the beautiful landscape of Falkland Estate in the Kingdom of Fife in Scotland. I’ll be there – why not pop along and say hello…

The Big Tent Festival is a fantastic weekend of music, arts and family activities mixed with stimulating debates on social and green issues. Wash this all down with incredible food and drink in the One Planet Food Village which celebrates the best in organic food and drink and you have a very special weekend.

Milomade will be accompanying ‘Audiences East Scotland‘ at their stall and displaying a range of goods made from [...]
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Some Facebook Tips

Milomade — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:24:38 +0000

Well it’s about time I got round to writing a tutorial about Facebook as I’ve promised so many people that I would. I joined Facebook in April and have written a few posts about it since, mostly offering promotions for my fans etc, but never really disclosed that much information about how to set up a page for your business and how to manage it.

Please bear in mind that I’m no expert and I’ve kind of made this up as I went a long and I’ve made a lot of [sometimes irreversible] mistakes along the way, so this is by no means a Facebook Bible to follow word for word, but hopefully it will helps some folk out along their Facebook journey. I won’t go into the details of setting up a page for your business as there are lots of resources online that can help you with this. [...]
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Scrap Exchange Challenge Exhibition

Milomade — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:58:03 +0000

If you’re a follower of my blog, you’ll know that I was involved in a very interesting project recently which involved making a piece of work from another artist’s rubbish. I was sent a shoebox in the post with lots of interesting items within it and set to work on making a piece of work or two. You can read more about that process here. I just thought I’d write a quick post to update you on what has happened to the work…

I took my two necklaces up to St Andrews and they are now in an exhibition in the foyer of the Town Hall. I didn’t manage to get any decent images of my two necklaces before taking them up which is a shame – it was all a bit rushed at the time, so I think I’ll have to go uo next week [...]
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Website Updates

Milomade — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:11:47 +0000

You may have noticed a severe lack of blogging lately. Well, I’ve been busy – very busy – not only with my recent craft fair at Ardross Farm, but also with website updates. Since I started working with precious and non precious metals and creating more ‘expensive’ pieces of jewellery, I’ve found it quite difficult to categorise what I do – is it jewellery? is it craft? is it both? Am I a Jeweller or am I a Maker or both?

It’s been difficult to figure out the best way to present my work and also what to sell at craft fairs. I would like to sell everything I make, but gathered all together it can be quite overwhelming and also confusing for the buyer. Some things are perfect for the craft market, others aren’t – so I’ve always been in a bit of a quandary.

I’ve [...]
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Trash to Treasure Competition…

Milomade — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:20:04 +0000

The lovely folk at Makers-Online have just opened their doors to entries for their Trash to Treasure competition. There’s a £200 cash prize and Rachelle Strauss from www.myzerowaste.com has agreed to do the judging! So get your thinking caps on and get creative with your waste and come up with something amazing and enter the competition.

Recycling is something that most of us take for granted these days as we want to help protect our environment but how many of us upcycle? Upcycling is the art of turning something that would otherwise go in the bin into a brand new object. Functional or decorative, the possibilities are endless with a little bit of imagination.

I upcycle lots of things and most of my product range is made from recycled/upcycled items. Here are some examples…

All my stationery range (envelopes, notebooks, gift tags, paper garlands, confetti) is [...]
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Vote for Milomade!

Milomade — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 14:20:48 +0000

I’ve just entered the Milomade Blog into the Little Blog Awards over at Dorset Cereals – if you’ve never tried Dorset Cereals, you should – very very Yummy – although a little bit pricey, but worth the pennies! I normally buy them occasionally as an indulgent treat. Anyway…

I’ve added my blog to their awards and I would really appreciate your support. So if you like my blog, please vote for it!

Click on the image above to cast your vote!

Thanks!

The Kindness of Strangers

Milomade — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:49:28 +0000

As you all know I’ve been busy making lots of stuff for my up and coming craft fair and one thing I’ve been using a lot is my sewing machine to run up lots of paper garlands. Well it’s a very very old machine (older than me) and the speed on it has always been temperamental in that it either zooms away manically or marches on with a steady pace – there seems to be very little control over this with the foot pedal anymore.

This isn’t so bad when sewing fabrics, but when sewing paper it always good to get a steady slow speed and over the past few weeks I’ve found this totally impossible and the thread has got tangled on too many occasions. It’s been a bit frustrating.

So I put out a call on Freecycle to see if anyone had a modern simple machine stashed away in [...]
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Rain Rain Go Away…

Milomade — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:17:07 +0000

Thanks to Jill Calder for coming up with the rain theme for this week’s Theme Thursday – it’s quite appropriate as Fife is a tad wet today! We could all do with looking at her brightly coloured illustrations to get some colour back into the day. Is summer over? The rain is here and it’s quite grim all of a sudden and even though I found the sunshine far too hot, I miss it already. I do love the rain though, don’t get me wrong, but it’s put a gloomy haze over the day today, so I went onto the Zibbet site to find some silver linings to our rain cloud situation to cheer us all up.

Brought to you from Zibbet.com – a global marketplace, connecting buyers and sellers of [...]
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Craft Fair Crazy – Part 3

Milomade — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:00:58 +0000

Not only have I been working away like a busy bee on envelopes and my shop keepers dummy display, I’ve also been busy making more paper garlands and coming up with a neat way to package them up. My old sewing machine is on it’s last legs though and the tension control is not what it used to be – sounds like it’s a bit incontinent in it’s old age and I guess it is a little – every now and again it just looses control of the thread and I end up battling away with a pin trying to untangle knots.

I think I need to it back to the sewing machine man in Edinburgh for a little TLC, to get oiled and tightened and cleaned – the machine is about 50 years old or older even, so it needs the occasional M.O.T. to keep it running [...]
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Craft Fair Crazy – Part 2

Milomade — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 20:09:43 +0000

I love making envelopes – I can’t stress that enough and over the past week or so I’ve been cutting maps, sheet music, pages from comic annuals etc into envelope shapes. I’ve then been folding and gluing and packaging them up – it’s been hard work, but I love repetitive tasks like this and I do love making envelopes – I know I’ve already said that, but I do!

So if you come along to Ardross Farm on the 10th/11th of July you’ll have the following to choose Envelopes made from recycled:

Sheet Music – always a favourite

Maps and Road Atlases

Snoopy Annuals

The Victor Book for Boys Annuals

2000AD Science Fiction magazines

Beano Magazines

So there’s tons to choose from!

They come in packs of 5 with lick and stick flaps and 5 address labels – wrapped in ethical biodegradable corn starch bags – all that for just £2.95 a pack – not bad!!

If you can’t [...]
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