my day job

A couple of months ago I started a new job at A Way Out in Stockton. It's an amazing charity that really does saves people's lives. I'd fully recommend you to check out the website and the work the charity does.

My job title is Fundraising Admin Assistant but I'm not entirely sure whether that gives the right impression of what I do. It sounds quite office based and a bit boring (at least that's what I thought when I was offered the role)! But in fact I love my job! It does have a more admin side to e.g. writing thank you letters to people who have donated money but that's a nice thing to do anyway. 

Our first big event - a jumble sale with a twist

But the vast majority of my job is to do with event planning. I'm one of two staff members in the brand new Fundraising department which means that we get to be really creative. All the work we've been doing so far has been centred around local, community events. These range from gig nights to fashion shows, golfing days to glamorous balls. So on a 'normal' day I might be pricing up Gucci boots for a designer jumble sale before heading out to a country estate to negotiate prices on a golfing day, then creating a running order for a gig and maybe designing a poster to advertise it!

I've blurred out the address as it was somebody's home

The poster design aspect of my job isn't one that I anticipated being allowed to devote so much time to. But good publicity is essential to promoting an event and so spending a bit of extra time making it look eye-catching and attractive is worthwhile. I've really enjoyed getting some more practice in graphic design and I really like thinking about the target markets for different events and trying to think of something that will really appeal to them.

Our under 18s warm-up to the festival season

I consider myself lucky to have such a fun job (even if I still have to write risk assessments and keep budgets)!

a springtime cosy for rainy days

I made this tea cosy several months ago but it's taken me this long to get round to posting about it. It was one of the first projects I wanted to do when I brought my sewing machine up to Durham at the beginning of the year because it would a) not take too long to make, b) not require me to buy much fabric as it's nearly all recycled bits and pieces and c) be useful - we didn't have one in our house before!

I bought the green background but it was only a fat 1/4 and came very cheap from the quilting stall (which I frequent regularly) in Durham's indoor market. Although you can't see it in these photos, the tea cosy is lined with some checked material which was left over from a hat my Mum made me when I was about six. The floral Liberty fabric is the same that I used for my pincushion and the pink printed material was brought back from Ghana by my aunt and uncle when they lived there about fifteen years ago. And as you can see, my Mum found something useful to do with it back then but I've somewhat outgrown the trousers and top now.

I designed the cosy myself and made a paper pattern for it which I've hung onto in case I make one of these for a friend. It did become quite fiddly sewing on the letters and birds though as I wanted the stitching to be invisible so it was done be hand and had to be quite precise. I also spent longer than I needed quilting the background, pinning and tacking it first to get the distances and angles right before realising that I had a quilting foot on my machine which would do all that for me!

Dress to skirt in 10 easy (or not so easy) steps!

I saw this dress about four years ago in a sale and loved the material so I bought it even though it was a size too small. I've never really got a lot of use out of it though because it wasn't very comfortable to wear. So this year I made the practical decision to transform it into a skirt. Luckily for me, my Mum who is great at dressmaking wrote out a nicely numbered set of instructions, which I followed (nearly) to the letter.

I had to buy a zip but the buttons I pinched from an old t-shirt that wore out. The most time consuming thing was definitely lining up the fabric because every time I thought I'd got it right and the pattern matched up, it would slide around and end up wonky again! But I'm happy with the end result and it's a pretty popular wardrobe choice for work these days...