This weekend, 23rd and 24th July, we will be exhibiting at the Made-It Craft Fair which is being held at the Crown Hotel, Harrogate. The fair opens at 10am on Saturday and Sunday morning. David has some new bowls which will be available for sale at the event, including some inspired by a visit to the Chelsea Flower Show in London earlier this year.
We always enjoy meeting people at the Made-It Craft Fairs and look forward to seeing you there.

Although we've both been a bit swamped with our 'day jobs' recently David has still managed to make a few new amazing bowls, all of which are now listed on our Etsy and Folksy pages.

We will be exhibiting this weekend on Saturday 2 April at the Made-It Craft Fair in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. The venue is in the Wesley Chapel (side entrance) on Oxford Street in Harrogate. The Craft fair opens at 10am and finishes at 4.30pm. I will be bringing a few new bowls inspired by my trip to New Zealand at the beginning of the year.
We will also be selling Laura's new childrens fascinators which are really cute. Of course we will also have a selection of gifts and accessories we have made recently. We look forward to seeing you there if you can make it.

Laura returned home to Portsmouth this week after being up north for our recent craft fair events. It was fantastic to spend time together working on new ideas for our products. Here in Harrogate the snow is a challenge sometimes, the pavements are very slippery but the whole town is covered in a beautiful blanket of white stuff.

Yesterday we uploaded some new bowls for sale on our Folksy and Etsy shops. There are two new flower bowls which are very bright and colourful and which we hope you will enjoy owning as much as we enjoyed making them. The Candy Flowers bowl features very jolly red and pink striped fantasy flowers and like the Flowers and Leaves bowl we think would make an excellent gift this Christmas. Please have a look at them in our shops when you have time.

After our visit to Scotland a couple of weeks ago I finished a bowl to celebrate to lovely island of Arran. This bowl is quite chunky and is decorated with an imagined view of the island in summer with blue sky and clouds. I expect Arran is covered in snow just now but if you have an opportunity to visit we would heartily recommend discovering "Scotland in miniature" for a truly wonderful experience.

Our next event will be at St Aidans School in Harrogate on Friday 3rd December. The Christmas Gift Fair will be open from 5pm until 9pm. We will be showing a selection of corsages and fascinators, our tie bags and my bowls. It would be lovely to meet you there.

I have been away visiting Northumberland recently. Mark and I stayed at Spylaw Farm near Chatton which is beautiful and restful place to vacation. We occupied Cuddy's Croft which is a small but perfectly formed self-catering cottage for two. It is very generously and comfortably equipped with pretty much everything you could possibly need. The owners Lorna and Andy are friendly and accommodating. Lorna leaves a tray of cake and tea things when you arrive and she can provide a three course meal made from goods grown on their farm wherever possible. There are chickens and geese and sheep and lots of land to roam on. It is by far my favourite home from home.

While we were there I was inspired by the countryside and the incredible local beaches. I painted a few bowls which I am pleased with at Spylaw. The first includes a pre-historic 'ring' stone carving we found on nearby heathland. These carvings are found across Northumberland and North Yorkshire and are pretty amazing. The one we visited was near Chatton.

We did a lot of walking in Northumberland and fortunately the weather was pretty kind most of the time. On one of the walks we collected crab apples and rose hips which we brought back home. I have since made a load of Rose Hip and Apple jelly which will be given away as Christmas gifts I expect. I found an excellent recipe at The Cottage Smallholder, a web site I visit often. It is full of great tips and advice for Hugh Fearlessly-Eats-It-All types and Kirsty wannabes. I love it. The walk also inspired a bowl with an autumnal woodland theme which I really enjoyed painting. I think it has a 'nursery' quality about it and I think perhaps the lost child in me came out whilst making it!

The best walk we had was taken on the advice of our landlord at Spylaw, Andy. He sent us off to Ross Sands Beach which is about five miles from the farm. You can get to it between Budle Bay and Lindisfarne after a short trek across the bird sanctuary and dunes. it was an very windy day! The sand was shifting like a flat cloud across the empty beach and the waves were wild and sparkling. It was magical. When I got back to Spylaw, weighed down with pebbles and shells I started to paint a little bowl to remember the day by.

Each of the bowls mentioned above are now for sale in our web shops at Folksy and Etsy.

Now I'm back in Harrogate I have been working on some new ideas. I have designed a new bowl which is decorated with pink flowers and I hope you will like it too. we have also produced an ameliagreenheart calender for 2011 which features images from some of the gifts and accessories Laura and I have been producing this year. It will be for sale at the craft Fairs we are participating in later this month and if anyone would like a copy please get in touch and we can send you one.

We do hope to be able to meet you at the FLARE craft events at Ripley, North Yorkshire on Sunday 21st November and at York on Sunday 28th November. We will also be at The St Aidans School Christmas Gift Fair in Harrogate on 3rd December.

It has been a busy week. I went to Beverley in East Yorkshire on Tuesday to a workshop run by Business Link: "Social Enterprise, is it for you?". It was an excellent event facilitated by Paul Nevin who has run successful social enterprise businesses in the past. Laura and I have been discussing the possibility of setting up a social enterprise business in Harrogate. It is a long-term plan but something we would very much like to pursue in the future. We will be sharing more about this venture shortly. In the meantime, if anyone is interested in our thoughts so far, we do have a consise business outline which we can send to you for review, feedback and suggestions. Send us an email request at ameliagreenheart@yahoo.com

I spent another brilliant day on Wednesday working at Henshaws Yorkshire in Knaresborough helping to prepare gifts to exhibit at their forthcoming Christmas Gift Fair in December. There are details of all their arts and crafts public events on their website.

Today I have been beavering away at making our new Christmas decoration bowls which should be on sale in our Etsy and Folksy shops at the beginning of next week. In the meantime we have added two new items: a large bowl entitled "Queuing for Tea in Harrogate" and a new design "Harrogate Stray in Autumn" which was inspired by walking across The Stray recently and the amazing colours of the autumn leaves.

This evening we have finally registered our web domain name. Now we have a very, really very basic web page which can be found at http://www.ameliagreenheart.co.uk/. The web pages have been created using Great British Business On-Line (GBBO). During the next few days we will be making the pages look beautiful and we will let you know when the site is looking good. For now the contact page on the site has all the basic information for getting in touch with us.

Best regards, David

One of our bowls, Night Trees and Stars (which is available in our folksy and esty shops) was featured on a very cool blog over the weekend: The Simple Melody which was very kind of them.

I will be attending a Business Link workshop tomorrow in Beverley, East Yorkshire: "Social Enterprise: is it for me?" I have been thinking about how we could incorporate a 'social enterprise' element to our business in the future and I'm hoping that this workshop will be a good starting point for considering this idea. We will keep you in touch with our plans and I will write about the workshop when I have a moment for anyone who is interested.

Our friend Linda Henderson suggested we look at a social enterprise project on the west coast of Scotland near Skye (where she lives) called Rag 'n Textile. I was very impressed with the work they are producing and will definitely keep an eye on what they are doing. Thanks Linda.

Finally we are hoping to be joining a Christmas Gift Fair at St Aidens High School in Harrogate on December 3rd. It is an evening event which should be really fun. We will post details when (if) our place there is confirmed. Best regards for now, David

Hello.
I have also been away. Mark and I went to New York for a week and had a great time there. I found some interesting and inspiring ideas from our visit which I hope we can translate into new products very soon. I have put some of my photographs on my Flikr page. I especially loved a quilt I found at the Devils Kitchen Market. They style is known as "dollar" or "penny" quilt and the one I saw was made from 1930's family fabrics. It was lovely.

Since we came back I have been working on a few new bowls. The Stray in Harrogate is an amazing open park space surrounded by trees. It is not really exaggerating to describe it as awesome. I will certainly be making some more because I really enjoy painting them and I'm hoping that other people will enjoy them as much as I do. So I have been producing bowls inspired by the trees there and there are two new ones for sale in the shop.

Last weekend we visited family staying at Flamborough Head in North Yorkshire for their holidays. We walked on the beach and I took loads of photographs of rock pools. I have started making a new range of Memory Bowls based on those.

We are hoping to be attending and selling our gifts at a few craft fairs and markets in Harrogate and North Yorkshire and in Portsmouth leading up to Christmas. We will keep you posted.

Yesterday I visited a car boot sale at Weatherby Racecourse (looking for silk ties for Laura's new tie bags). It was a beautiful day, lots of people and stuff. While there I met some people who have recently started a business "Your Gift Box". They prepare brilliant gift boxes for all occasions. I especially liked the box for a student starter which had a variety of little gifts to get a uni newbie feeling good about being in Halls for the first time. They will personalise the gift box to suit the person you want to gift. It's a really nice service. They don't have a web page yet (but I think they are planning to) but you can get in touch with them by email ygb1@hotmail.com or 07806 754648.

Since getting back from my stay with David in Harrogate, I've been trying to organise myself a space to work at home. It hasn't gone very well so far. I have good intentions of clearing our spare room so that I can have a proper creative "office". I am easily distracted, so having a dedicated space will be invaluable.

Today I've finally managed to make a successfull prototype tie-bag, after much sewing and unpicking of various other attempts. I had the idea to re-use the material from gentleman's ties while I was in Harrogate, and this is the result so far. I plan to keep experimenting with this and trying different sizes until I find a few styles that I'm happy with. Being a perfectionist doesn't make this process go quickly!

I've also been sewing a collection of labels to put on my items. I've used the cotton padding from inside the ties as the base - another opportunity to recycle! Tomorrow I'll be attaching these to the items I've already made, and probably sewing a few more. I feel this will become a never ending task...

I have also just added an Etsy tab to my Facebook page, and will be doing the same for the ameliagreenheart page shortly. This will update automatically with all our new listings and posts (hopefully), so should save a lot of time!

Hello. This is our first posting! We decided this week to get our little business underway formally and properly by registering with Inland Revenue as a self-employed partnership. Laura has been staying with me here in Harrogate and we have been doing some local research on the sorts of products people sell in gift and craft shops here.
Today we have spent what seemed like hours building this blog and thinking about what we can do next. We have a list! On the right hand side of this post is a link to our Etsy shop where you can look at the items we currently have for sale (and buy!). The shop accepts PayPal which seems to be a good standard.
Our next task will be to get a YouTube or similar account so that we can chat on video about what we are doing, show you what we are currently making, how we make it and keep in touch. We welcome your custom, suggestions and feedback. David