Tobacco Factory Sunday Market

Every Sunday the Tobacco Factory hold a market. They often have over 40 food & craft stalls. It is a thriving market promoting local produce.

On the day we went, it was absolutely freezing. But despite the cold, the market was full of people. It was lovely to see a market being fully supported by the local community.

There was a diverse selection of food stalls and craft sellers at the market. It was nice to see a mix of food & craft. Many of the craft fairs I have been to in the past have not been well attended. I think food stalls attract people into the market and then people are more inclined to browse the handmade stalls whilst they are there.

My Mum bought a handmade coat hook from Clark and Robinson. It is well made and has great detail on the coat hooks. An individual piece that you wont find anywhere else.

I bought a lovely selection of fresh veg. It was really nice to see huge muddy parsnips, rather than the sanitised supermarket versions. Incidentally, Huge Muddy Parsnips is quite a good name for a band...

I bought the other half a huge, handmade chocolate heart from Zara's Chocolates. My niece also bought two bars of chocolate from her. we demolished a whole bar of salted praline between us. It was cold, we needed the calories. I can confirm that it was some of the nicest chocolate I have ever eaten.

I also bought some spicy chutneys. The carrot chutney is incredibly fiery...we all need a bit of heat in the Winter though don't we?

We will definitely be going back and I'm considering having a stall there myself selling my vintage wares, watch this space...

Celebrating creative upcycling and crafts at Children's Scrapstores

When I was a child I loved nothing better than making stuff out of bits and bobs destined for the bin. I cannot count the number of cardboard box, tin foil, loo roll monsters I made when I was little. A pile of cardboard, string, glue and poster paints fired up my imagination and made me think ‘what shall I create today?’

Across the UK there are a network of Scraptores UK that continue the tradition of helping children to use their imaginations and create something with their hands. Each scrapstore is a treasure trove of clean scrap waste materials donated by business to be reused by local children in whatever way their creative urge takes them. The range of materials in any of the scrapstore changes each day and could include card, paper, textiles, paint, cork, wool, cardboard tubes, netting, gauze and many other things.

Scrapstores promote ‘play without rules’ and understand the importance of creative play in a child’s development. Every child needs to have the chance to squish clay, get covered in paint and look at a pile of scrap and think ‘what could I make with that?’ Scrapstores offer affordable craft materials to a wide range of bodies working in education, training, arts and culture, environment and conservation and projects involving children and young people. By taking familiar objects we all recognise from everyday use and encouraging children to use them in new and unusual ways, Scrapstores foster creative expression. The organisation has already helped out over 80,000 community groups by providing access to an exciting variety of materials.

Whilst local branches operate as separate entities, ScrapstoresUK was set up in an attempt to coordinate the work that individual scrapstores do across the UK. ScrapstoresUK acts as a champion for the movement and raises public awareness, facilitates fundraising and attempts to make each scrapstore run in an effective and efficient way. They also offer a useful online directory of all the scrapstores, so if you feel inspired to find out more, their website will have all the information you need to track down your local store.

All Scrapstores have different means of accessing their scrap materials. In some you need to pay an individual membership fee, at others you simply pay for the scrap you take on the day. Membership is generally offered to groups who work in creative play, care, educational and therapeutic settings. A number of Scrapstores also have shops open to the public selling good quality art and craft materials from glue to paintbrushes to complement the scrap.

We paid a visit to my local scrapstore which is based in Bristol to find out more about the work they do. The Bristol Children's Scrapstore is one of the oldest in the UK and has been open for over thirty years. To access the main scrap warehouse you need to be a member, but the Bristol branch also operates a craft supplies store called Artrageous Store which is open to the general public. Artrageous is a thriving business where you can find a wide selection of goods including art supplies such as glue, paint and modelling clay, they also stock puppets, wooden toys and musical instruments. Every other weekend Artrageous throws open its doors and invites children to come along and try out the craft materials. These ‘Super Saturday Sample Sessions’ encourage children to gain hands-on experience of creating a finished crafty item from scratch. The friendly staff encourage kids to get their hands on raffia, felt, glitter, crayons and lots of gloopy glue. All the proceeds from Artrageous support the Children’s Scrapstore and help to maintain local community projects working with local children.

Alongside Artrageous is the adjoining Children’s Scrapstore warehouse. There are an abundance of crafty delights with large containers filled with netting, colourful gauzes, plastic tubes, surgical masks, piles of remote controls, reels of sparkling paper, mounds of foam shapes, towers of take-away cartons and even the odd shop mannequin. Each item was destined for landfill and through Scrapstores it can now find a new life in a creative project.

The Scrapstores movement is something to be cherished and supported. By encouraging creative play, children learn communication skills, creativity and problem solving, team work and collaboration and a willingness to experiment. As with all charity projects, Scrapstores needs resources to keep functioning. Whether you donate scrap, volunteer your time or become a member, there are many ways to keep your nearest branch operating. Now I’ve discovered my local scrapstore, it would take a gang of foil covered, paint daubed, googly eyed cardboard box monsters to keep me away!

all photos were taken by my niece Jessica Chappell, you can see her blog here www.kingofthesheep.blogspot.co.uk

Scraptores UK

Bristol Children's Scrapstore

Artrageous Store

If you're interested in finding more interesting children's craft projects, you may like to follow my "Kids Crafts: gluing, cutting, sticking, painting" board on Pinterest...

Follow Pouch : blogging + craft's board Kids Crafts: gluing, cutting, sticking, painting on Pinterest.

I'm linking up with these lovely blogs:

Trash 2 Treasure over on www.coombemill.com

Brilliant Blog Posts over on honestmum.com

Share With Me over on www.letstalkmommy.com

What I'm Writing over on writingbubble.co.uk

Bristol's Big Green Week

The Big Green Week started in Bristol today...a festival of eco ideas, art and entertainment running from Saturday 15 June 2013 through to Sunday, 23 June, 2013.

There are huge array of family events, theatre and poetry, conferences and workshops...you can see the full programme here. Highlights include talks from Richard Branson, performances from John Hegley and Tony Hawks and a glamorous ‘FareFashion’ festival launch evening.

The UK’s festival of eco ideas, art and entertainment is back in the centre of Bristol from 15th to 23rd June. Join more than 40,000 visitors who will start early and stay late to enjoy two weekends of free family entertainment and nine days of inspiring talks, workshops, art, music, poetry, comedy and films.

And to kick-start the festival, Bristol has been crowned the European Green Capital for 2015 at a ceremony in Nantes on June 14th.

The city beat Brussels in Belgium, Glasgow in Scotland and Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, to the win. Nantes in France currently holds the title.

The title rewards cities which consistently achieve high environmental standards and are committed to further improvement and sustainability.

Last year Bristol was the runner-up, finishing behind Copenhagen in Denmark. It is the third time the city has made the final shortlist.

You can read more about the Bristol bid on the Bristol Pound website

Tutorial: foldaway market tote

This handy reusable tote folds away into it's own pocket. Perfect for storing in your purse for spontaneous shopping sprees. I have made mine from upcycled vintage fabric, but feel free to use any lightweight cotton. The following is a sewing tutorial for making this lovely tote. You will find full instructions and free pattern to download and print.


Foldaway market tote tutorial
You will need:
Fabric
Scissors
Thread
Pins
Pattern paper (squared)
Sewing machine
You will need a piece of material 84 x 71cm. Cut out the 4 main pieces plus a piece for the pocket 18 x 36cm. All seams are 1cm. You can find the pattern template for this tutorial below. It is not to scale and is for guidance only. You will need to make a template on pattern paper, I would recommend using squared paper so that you can achieve true straight edges.

I have also included the full two-page tutorial at the end of this blog post, you are welcome to print that out and work from those instructions.
Step 1. Fold the pocket piece with right sides {RS} together and stitch around the edge leaving a small gap.Trim the corners and turn right side out.

Step 2. Place the pocket with the fold at the top, centrally on the right side of one main bag piece. Stitch around 3 sides.

Step 3. Join the main pieces {RS} to {RS} at the tops of the handles. Neaten the raw edges by pinking or zig-zag machine stitch.

Step 4. Neaten all round the inside raw edge between the handles by pinking or zig-zag machine stitch.Then turn under and sew all around the edge making a curve at the corners.You may need to clip the corners slightly.

Step 5. Sew the bottom of the bag {RS} to {RS} and neaten the raw edges as before.

Step 6. Pin the side pieces {RS} to {RS} by lining the top edge to the mark on the main bag piece (about 7 inches from the top) and the bottom edge centrally to the bottom seam of the bag.

Step 7. Sew all around the seam leaving 10mm at the top. In each corner pivot your work keeping the needle down in the material. Neaten raw edges as before.

Step 8. Pink or zig-zag stitch around the side edge of the bag opening. Turn under and sew all around the edge. Turn bag right side out.

And there you have it, a strong, yet lightweight foldaway tote, handy for a multitude of uses.



You are welcome to print the following two instruction pages out and work from there.
I would love to hear any comments or see any photos of your finished foldaway market totes!
Copyright: This tutorial is intended for personal use only. Please don't make these market totes to sell. You are more than welcome to share this tutorial. but if you do, please could you link back to http://www.meyouandmagoo.co.uk

And finally, if you would like to follow me on Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest, you’re more than welcome!

I also sell a range of handmade goodies, including vintage fabric cushion covers, lavender filled rabbits and owls and a gorgeous range of vintage trims browse my shop by clicking this link

Free UK Shipping!

I'm not usually one to discuss Christmas shopping in September, but bear with me whilst I explain!

We're in the process of relocating homes and there is a good chance that we will move sometime around November or December. This means that, shock horror, I will have to close my online shops whilst we make the move and get ourselves settled and more importantly, reconnected to the internet!

So in a bid to encourage my lovely customers to buy their gifts early, I'm offering Free UK Shipping in my Etsy store. Please use the code POUCHUK at checkout.

Etsy coupon codes are a doddle to use, simply click "Apply shop coupon code" at checkout to open the field to enter the coupon code for your order. Etsy automatically apply the discount to your order, so you can sit back and wait for your goodies to arrive!

Etsy store

I'm also offering free shipping in my Folksy store too. This is slightly different as Folksy don't offer the option to use coupon codes. So if you purchase something and you're in the UK, I will refund your postage costs via Paypal.

Folksy store

New eco friendly packaging

I've recently taken delivery of my new mailing bags - they are made from Biothene and are 100% biodegradable. I've always resisted using plastic mailing bags because I thought they weren't great for the environment. Before I had my daughter, when I had more time on my hands, I used to recycled old bubble mailers. It was something I enjoyed doing and many of my customers commented on how much they liked the revamped envelopes. Now that I simply don't have the time to repurpose bubble mailers, I wanted to look for an alternative which fitted in with Pouch's eco ethos. I feel that the Biothene mailers are just right for Pouch: they biodegrade, they take less energy to make than paper envelopes and the bags degrade into a non-toxic residue. Oh, and they are pink :)

New Years Resolution: decluttering

I'm not keen on making loads of New Years Resolutions which fall by the wayside come the end of January. One I am planning on sticking to is making an attempt to declutter our house.

This plastic jug pictured above just about sums up my problem. It sits tucked away under my toilet cistern, in our bathroom. Everytime a toothbrush gets too worn out to be used on our teeth, I put it in the jug where it might 'come in handy' for something. My husband thinks I'm mad, but tolerates these things. Whilst I am not a hoarder on this type of scale, I do hate to throw things out. The thought of all the waste making it's way to landfill in this country alone on a daily basis makes me shudder.

Kerbside recycling has improved dramatically over the past few years and we can easily put out paper, cardboard, certain plastics, food waste and garden waste to be picked up from our doorsteps. I'm also keen on passing on sellable things and regularly fill bags for charity. We've also used Freecycle on many occasions and I think it's a fantastic site and must help to prevent more waste going to landfill. We've passed on old TVs, a stereo, old toys, plant pots, boxes of tiles and even a double mattress. The fact that someone is willing to collect from your house is fantastic. I think since we've lived in our current house, we've been to the local rubbish dump about 5 times over 5 years, which is pretty good going and I think Freecycle has been a big help in keeping those trips to the dump to a minimum.

But what about the jug of toothbrushes? There are just some things that don't fit into the kerbside collections and noone would want these in a charity shop and I think they are even beyond Freecyclers, yet I can't bring myself to chuck them in the bin...I know one of the golden rules on recycling is not to buy items in the first place if you can possibly help it, which is something I try to stick to, but as far as toothbrushes go, I don't want to lose my teeth, so I'm going to keep on brushing them. Which leaves the problem of what to do with the old brushes.

And there are lots of other household items that fall into that category, video tapes, old CDs, wine bottle corks, plastic spoons...the list goes on.

Which is why am I so glad I stumbled across this website when trying to find ways to recycle my growing collection of toothbrushes.

How can I recycle this? is a fantastic source of ideas for all those hard to recycle items. It's run by two people who were in exactly the same position as I am now when faced with waste which could be reused if only they knew how. The site works by taking suggestions for items to be reused, then it's up to the good people of the internet to post their suggestions underneath said item. The site also likes to promote people's clever, interesting and creative ideas for recycling something.

A quick search of the site throws up this post on "How can I reuse or recycle … old toothbrushes?". There are some interesting suggestions, including using a Terradent toothbrush, which helps to eliminate the need to keep buying new toothbrushes in the first place. Apart from toothbrushes there are so many other clever ideas, in fact the site has over 14,000 suggestions for a plethora of items. It's definitely a site I will be bookmarking for later use!

Magazine feature

I'm so excited to be featured in the first ever issue of 'Sew Eco' magazine! Pouch is listed in the 'Gallery of Inspiration' section at the front of the publication. They have included a lovely big image of the 'go green reversible market day tote', I think it looks fab!

It's always lovely to see your work in print...

Spring Cleaning

I'm not sure if you can say you 'treat' yourself to cleaning products, it depends on how much you love housework I guess. But I have to say, I'm a tiny bit in love with the Earth Friendly range of cleaning stuff!



I am something of a reluctant domestic goddess at the best of times, but even I love using the Parsley surface cleaner - it has such a fresh smell and leaves everything sparkling. Plus the skin isn't stripped from your hands, your nose isn't affronted with artificial chemicals and whatever gets washed down the sink wont harm aquatic life.

When I ordered my latest selection of Earth Friendly products, I received a free gift - a Michael's Originals washing-up luffa. they are designed to be used instead of those plasticky scourer sponges you can buy. I must admit, it does feel a bit strange doing the washing up with a loofah, but they certainly work well. As it says on their website, they have been used for many years in other countries - sometimes traditional ideas are the best.

"In the Philippines, luffas have been used as washing-up scourers for generations. Continuing this tradition, Michael's Luffas are grown to organic principles on his parent's farm for this purpose. Ideal for washing-up, Michael's luffas are supple enough to bend round rims, reach into corners and have plenty of scrubbing power. They last for between 3 and 12 months and when they are worn out can be composted, saving landfill."

Sustainable Fishing

Channel 4 are currently running a season of programs to highlight the current problems with the way fish are caught off our coastline. I watched Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's program the other night and it sent my blood pressure through the roof. It's a good job organisations like Channel 4 run programs such as these or I would never learn about the senseless waste of precious fish stocks.

Most people know that the seas are over fished and you assume that EU fish quotas are set up to help this situation. Apparently not. I cannot believe that nearly 50% of all fish caught in the north sea are thrown back dead. Fishermen are not allowed to land over-quota fish such as cod and haddock, so they have no choice but to throw them back. You can read more about the campaign here. You can also keep up to date with the campaign by following @hughsfishfight on Twitter.

If you are interested in joining the campaign to send a letter to to Commissioner Maria Damanaki, members of the Common Fisheries Policy Reform Group, and all MEPs, check out the Fish Fight website. Over 94,000 people have already signed up which is great news.

Channel 4 are also urging people to eat types of seafood that are traditionally less popular. They want to encourage people to eat more sustainable varieties and not turn to the usual suspects such as Cod, Salmon and Tuna. Find some inspiration here

It's ceratinly made me think about the fish I buy and I'm going to try out some of the recipes over the coming weeks.

Autumn colours

I have been listing a number of totes, belts and owls in my Etsy store over the past few days. They all have a distinctly Autumnal feel to them (love the word Autumnal, almost as much as I love the word haberdashery).

There are lots of shades of burnt orange, russet red and mustard yellow. I love vintage fabric, but I have a particular weakness for brown and orange hues, which is lucky as nearly everything was brown and orange in the 1970s!















Click here to find out more about the new additions to my Etsy store

Celebrating 15 years of the National Cycle Network

Sustrans is inviting people to capture on camera how cycling routes have changed their lives. Anyone who enjoys using the National Cycle Network are being asked to make a short, two minute film to mark its 15th anniversary.

Sustrans the Bristol-based sustainable transport charity now wants to compile a collection of stories about the impact the network has made on people's lives so far.



The entries will be judged by Merlin Crossingham (Creative Director for Wallace & Gromit), Alice Roberts and Adam Hart-Davis. Full details of the prizes can be found here



Take a look at the Sustrans film below and then check out the competition website to get started.



The image at the top of this blog post is of me on the Bristol to Bath cycle track. You can find out more by visiting the Bristol and Somerset section of the Sustrans website.

July Tote Giveaway

I thought it was high time I ran another giveaway on my blog. Up for grabs is this bold and Summery Canvas Stripey Tote. made from sturdy canvas in shades of citrus orange, sunny yellow, lime green and pale purple.

Perfect for taking to the shops to stock up on provisions. Also makes a great knitting bag, book bag, gym bag, you can cram virtually anything into this handy tote.







How to enter:

mandatory - Leave a comment stating your favorite item from my Etsy store. This applies to both new and old followers.

Three additional ways to enter:
1. Become a follower of my blog. Leave a comment and let me know that you're new.
2. If you are already a follower of my blog (as of July 1st, 2010) and you choose to enter by leaving a comment, you will be entered twice in the giveaway. Although I've made a note of my followers, please remind me by stating 'I'm already a follower' when you leave a comment. This is a way to say thank you to everyone who's been reading my blog over the past few months!
3. Tweet this giveaway:
@pouchdesigns July Tote Giveaway http://pouchbags.blogspot.com/2010/06/july-tote-giveaway.html


**If you enter this giveaway, please state clearly your email address, OR your Facebook/Twitter/Etsy username, so I can contact you in case you win**

The giveaway is open to everyone in the world, and will run from July 1st 2010 through to Midnight (BST) on July 15th, 2010. I will pick a winner at random, and announce the winner on July 16th, 2010.

**UPDATE**
This giveaway is now closed, thanks to all who took part!