Blog Archives - Page 5 of 5

Posted on July 4, 2016July 4, 2016 by Lily Otton

How To: Tassel Bag Charm

How to: Tassel Bag Charm

This project has evolved from, like all good projects, our general obsession with tassels. This is a really quick easy make that can be adjusted to include almost anything from your stash box, so don’t feel obliged to recreate ours exactly!

You will need: One statement bead, one metal charm, one split ring, one bag charm clip, 3 x 20cm strip of suede, craft wire, round nose pliers & flat nose pliers.

First, use your round nose pliers to turn over the end of a piece of craft wire to make a loop, and thread your statement bead on.

Use the same pliers to make a loop on the other end too – we’ve done a fancy wrapped loop for extra security.

Next, use the flat nose pliers to open one of your loops, and pop your metal charm. Close it afterwards, making sure it’s securely shut.

Grab one of your pieces of suede and loop it through the split ring. Tie a normal overhand knot to turn it into a dangle! Repeat with your other two bits of suede.

Add your bead & charm combo, and then add the bag charm clip too. And that’s it! Fasten to your bag for instant happiness.

Fancy giving it a go? Click here to buy everything you need to make this fab piece (it also only costs £2 – bargain)

Posted on July 1, 2016 by Lily Otton

The Importance of Sequins

Ever since I’ve been old enough to dress myself I’ve been old enough to not just want, but need to wear sequins and at any and all given opportunities. So imagine my pure joy to read that not just sequins, but casual sequins were going to be a hot trend for Fall 2016….pass the glitter bucket, I need to submerge myself.

The love of sequins is a straightforward one – they’re sparkly and bright and attention grabbing and make you look like a walking talking disco ball. Maybe you have to wear a boring uniform to work, or your life is difficult and tedious and you’ve not been having much fun lately? Put on a sequin dress and get ready to be cured of your day to day problems, mainly through the sheer mass of compliments you’ll get from drunk girls in toilets – generally known to be the best people in the world. And if the thought of turning all heads as you Beyonce stride your way into anywhere frightens you, remember that this is yet another joy of sequins: if people are blinded by how fabulous your outfit is, they’re pretty unlikely to notice your adult acne or wonky teeth or that one of your arms is longer than the other. Sequins just give, give, give and ask only that you hoover them up off your bedroom floor on a semi regular basis.

Even better than this is that this emerging trend absolutely encourages the casual sequin, and presents itself in some awesome daytime staples: sequin jeans, sparkly bomber jackets, shiny silver sweatshirts? Yes please. Why should the sequin queens among us be restrained to nighttime activities only? Pop a sequin jacket on for your morning commute and tell me you don’t feel like a fabulous cross between Lady Gaga and and attendee of Gatsby’s mansion.

Mermaid Sequin Jeans – Topshop

And although writing about the important of sequins makes me feel a bit like Elle Woods writing about the ‘History of Polka Dots’ in Legally Blonde, I think there’s a lot to be said for finding happiness in the small things. Call me shallow or silly but wearing glitter shoes for the day would make me feel just that little bit better about life, and seeing someone on the bus with the confidence to rock a sequin bomber jacket would make me unquestionably joyous.

Put perfectly for Vogue by Julia Hobbs: “My advice? It’s time to ditch the round-the-clock wardrobe staples. Fail-safe shopping is now a shopping fail; it now pays to look like you’ve had fun in making an effort to dress up. Particularly when your dress lights up the room. Like, actually.”

The timing of this fits in perfectly with the event of the summer: Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie. What better advocate was there ever for OTT dressing than Eddie? In her sunglasses, towering platforms and ‘Lacroix’ emblazoned tops, if we ever needed a poster girl for the fancy-dressing-at-all-times movement it has to be Jennifer Saunders in this 90’s role.

This is the kind of trend that obviously makes us deeply happy in craft land because what it means to us is: embellishment. We sell beautiful sequins on their own and by the metre, so you can buy whichever colour you like, and spend an evening adorning all the boring old t-shirts you own. And why stop at sequins? There’s a massive selection of beads that would do just as wonderful a job – tiny glass rocailles to created intricate patterns with, to multicoloured crystal hexagons to stitch around a neckline. More is more with this trend – there’s no such thing as overdressed in this world.

Posted on June 25, 2016July 4, 2016 by Lily Otton

How to: Vintage Leaf Festival Hair Crown

How to: Vintage Leaf Festival Crown

Mattie came up with this design while trying to think of new and pretty ways to use our special leaf shaped beads that we obtained in a big haul of vintage stock a few years ago. As with all good ideas, this one involved a crown. Follow our instructions below to make your own beaded crown, sturdy enough to survive the entirety of festival season…

You will need: 0.6mm wire, vintage leaf beads, vintage pearl beads, 50cm ribbon. This can be done with any beads and ribbon of your choice – as long as their not too heavy to adorn your head all day! We use 0.6mm wire here because it was the thickest we could fit through our leaf beads, but 0.8mm is also great and a bit sturdier (if you can fit it through!)

1. Cut yourself a piece of wire 1 metre long.

2. Start threading your beads on – we threaded two leaves, followed by a pearl, and repeated this pattern.

3. Once it looks like it’s getting long enough, check it around your head for length. It should sit comfortably on your head like a crown, not fall down and into your eyes.

4. Where the two ends meet, wrap the wire around each other nice and neatly, and then trim down with a wire cutter so they’re not poking out.

5. Tie your piece of ribbon so it covers up your wire wrap.

6. Voila! Wear all day like a festival queen.

If you fancy giving this a go we’ve put together everything you need in a kit – and with 3 colours to choose from! Check it out by clicking here.

Posted on June 20, 2016February 23, 2021 by Lily Otton — 2 Comments

5 Reasons We Love The Contemporary Craft Festival

With the Contemporary Craft Festival at Bovey Tracey having finished over a week ago, we’re only just getting ourselves settled back in to normal shop life; featuring indoor trading, ant-free lunches and a notable lack of bar. In memory of another awesome year selling at our favourite show, I thought I’d put together a list of reasons why we’re still quite so obsessed with it. Enjoy!

1. People appreciate a good button

This is in no way to suggest that our regular shop customers don’t appreciate a good button, but if you were to take all the ones who REALLY appreciate a good button and put them all in one place, that place would be the Contemporary Craft Festival. We can take our fanciest, most beautiful, most special buttons and be safe in the knowledge that lots of punters will be excited about them as we are. I suggested this theory to one lady buying some of our enamelled shank yellow flower buttons (swoon), who replied “Yes! I absolutely appreciate a good button.” Case closed.

2. The level of craft wonderfulness

The foundation to why this show is so successful and so popular must be that the level of crafters showcasing their creations inside (and outside!) the marquees is so high. How exciting to walk around the tents, cooing and swooning over all these original handmade products and ideas and to discuss it with the maker face to face. This year both Mattie and I bought something awesome from the gentleman at Vinegar and Brown Paper, which made me proper giddy with excitement. There was also some beautiful work in the start up area, and we both fell for the geometric jewellery at Eleanor Jane Jewellery. I think even with an infinite budget, you couldn’t buy everything you wanted at this show….

3. The community spirit

Mattie thinks this is possibly the 8th/9th year trading over at Bovey, so every year it’s great to catch up with the familiar faces & friends. One of my favourite groups of people to catch up with the show are the guys from Pocketwatch Theatre company, this year dressed up as the Mad Hatter, Queen of Hearts and Alice. They’re some of the friendliest people we get to hang out with every year, and I loved sitting round a toadstool table with them while they drank tea, having a chat with the Mad Hatter about his wooden-spool needs and seeing them under huge rainbow umbrellas when the rain hit. There’s also our lovely friends who run Felt Folk, who truly out glammed us at the private view event on the Thursday – we’ll remember to up our game in 2017!

4. The Little Touches

The whole event was rebranded as a ‘Contemporary Craft Festival’ rather than a Craft Fair a couple of years ago, and when you visit it’s easy to see why. The whole atmosphere of the event makes me feel like something quite like a festival (but much less muddy) – seeing the same people every day, eating all the delicious food (waffles were the best!), seeing people asleep in deck chairs, chatting with strangers all day, and my favourite: 4pm bar run time. Working at the festival is weirdly knackering, so we always treat ourselves to a cheeky glass of wine from the lovely bar around 4pm. It’s a hard life…

5. That’s the way to do it

I’m aware this is an entirely personal one, but for me it’s always Punch and Judy – potentially, I think, one of the most undervalued comic performances ever. We’ve been there enough years now that we recognise the puppeteer, and I feel in a major way that he is my hero. Last year my mum bought me one of his colour-in posters, which is a very cool sentence and I have no shame about this. The baby getting made into sausages, the crocodile eating people, the devil having fights with Mr Punch? It’s utter madness and I just can’t get enough of it.

This really only covers a very small selection of reasons why this event is so fabulous, and that’s before you even get to the masses of hard work that must go into it from the organisers. If you haven’t been before, we’ll be sure to remind you about it constantly in June next year. See you then!

Posted on April 26, 2016May 16, 2016 by Lily Otton — 4 Comments

Bunyip & Otton’s Update

If you’ve popped in lately you may have noticed some slight changes to Bunyip & Otton’s since the start of April – although these outward changes have been minimal, we have actually gone through a fairly significant change in the structure of our businesses. Like all excellent life decisions, Mattie and I had this one after a few glasses of wine in a hotel in Birmingham in February.

Flashback: since we moved Bunyip out onto Fore Street in 2013 we’ve been functioning as 2 businesses – Mattie’s long standing Bunyip Beads & Buttons, and my own Otton’s Haberdashery. I could never have done this without Mattie & Bunyip (and other wonderful people of course!), from the business starting advice to the friendship support to the relief of so many financial burdens of opening a retail space – especially one in such a big, beautiful and expensive shop!

I’d always wanted to open a haberdashery (well I always wanted to open a ribbon shop, but that’s because I have weird ribbon love that I’m not sure would be reciprocated by the public enough to sustain a business) because I’d always felt most at home when sewing, a feeling that I think you can only relate to about that one thing in your life that makes you feel centered – craft or gardening or dancing or music or whatever it is that makes your soul happy. This has never meant that I’m the best sewer in the world, but I never wanted to be – I just love to make things, and get masses of enjoyment out of the process.

I opened the shop on very little money, and was incredibly lucky to be allowed to live at home by my ever generous parents, who still continue to house me and make me cups of tea when I’m hungover. This meant that I never had to pay myself from the shop profits, ensuring that I could put almost the entirety of any excess money back into stock, keeping the stock levels as high as I could. The downside to this was that I never had a huge amount of money in stock, with the actual costs of running the previously mentioned big & beautiful retail space meaning I really struggled to build the business – my (respectable) turnover was covering costs and stock but not allowing me the chance to grow.

Speaking of growth, there was obviously my life too. When I opened the shop I was 22, fresh out of University and more than willing to give the shop everything, sacrificing being able to settle myself financially – get a full time job, start paying my student loans back and get a place for myself. The shop is now 2.5 years old, I’m 25 and increasingly desiring the financial stability to start feeling like a fully fledged grown up – or at least a young woman who buys wine that costs more than £4.75 a bottle (joke – I’ll never give you up delicious cheap Sauvignon).

Back to present day. We’d spent the weekend at the CHSI show in Birmingham, a trade show that in theory showcases the upcoming trends & hot items for the next year. What we’d noticed, even with our hangover heads on, was that it was all sewing related. Beautiful fabrics and contemporary kits – this was where all the innovation was. This was pretty deflating for me, since I wanted to buy so many wonderful things, knowing that they’d sell to our super cool customers (hey guys) and that they would be as excited by them as I was – I just didn’t have the money to put into it, especially with rent day looming. This is when the idea presented itself – Mattie offered to buy my business, giving me enough financial stability to move myself and the business forward. Under her ownership the shop could really grow, gaining all this wonderful stock that it so desperately needed and really allow it to flourish in the way that I always wanted it to.

To be honest, I jumped at this idea. Although I loved owning the business and being self employed (well, it has its moments!) I really felt like this wasn’t about me. I wanted the shop to reach its full potential, and I knew that I wasn’t able to do this, at any time in the near future at least. The real thing that sealed this deal was Mattie’s other offer, to employ me full time. So for me, I would now be getting paid more than £1 an hour (genuinely what I was paying myself a lot of the time), would still get to do the best job in the world and would get to see the shop, hopefully, grow and conquer Exeter, and then the world. Easy decision.

Now the important bit – how does this affect you, wonderful customers & friends of Otton’s Haberdashery? It doesn’t! The shop is still functioning in the same way, I’m still here, the stock is still here, it’s all just hopefully more awesome than it was before (it so is – even just a month in!). The Otton’s website will eventually have all its shop items moved over to the Bunyip website, and you may just notice a decline in my Otton’s social media posts. This is only because I’m now concentrating on the Bunyip Beads pages – it’s still me writing the posts, just in a slightly different location. We hope to rebrand the entire shop at some point, as our craft offering is becoming more and more diverse and it would be great to have a name to reflect this. But all in good time – the next year should be really, really exciting for Mattie and I, and the other badass Bunyip ladies.

In summary, keep coming in to see us in the next few weeks and months, because we have loads of exciting things to buy and share with you, and new awesome workshops to get you involved in too. Stay in touch on the Bunyip social media – facebook, twitter, instagram as linked.

If you’ve made it to the end of this, I salute you. Thank you for reading! And for being our customers and friends – I hope this is all as exciting for you as it is for me.

Lily x

Posted on February 11, 2016February 22, 2021 by Mattie

Be Our Valentine

Valentine’s Day

It’s finally getting too near to deny it anymore. This Sunday. It’s happening. We’re not overly keen on the celebrations here at Bunyip, since we’re all working or away entertaining the extended family, so we’ve put together a collection of wonderful things you can make for yourself, or a loved one, or your cat. We’re not here to judge.

Wooden Heart Hanger

For the minimal effort enthusiasts – we sell these awesome cut out wooden hearts in loads of beautiful bright colours. String one on a pretty piece of thread and hang in the window for instant prettiness.

Button Hearts

One of our favourite things to make ever, button hearts are easily whipped up out of your button stash. You need some craft wire (we go for 0.6mm silver plated, grab some here) and lots of pretty buttons of a similar size. Lay them out first so you know what you’re doing, and then cut yourself a nice long piece of wire – exactly how long depends on the size of your heart. Start by threading on your button that’s right at the bottom of your heart onto the middle of the wire, and then thread your others on evenly to either side, shaping nicely at the top into an attractive heart shape. Once your buttons are meeting at the top, twist the two ends together, snip off any excess and tie on a nice piece of clear nylon or thin ribbon.

Felt Hearts

What better way to fill those lonely hours than cutting out loads of felt hearts, popping them all through a sewing machine and making yourself some lush felty garlands? Pro tip: make these in black and grey to curb your romance induced nausea.

Heart Charms – Earrings

For instant jewellery making gratification there’s always earring making too. We have lots love and heart based things you could pop straight on an earring hook – just use a flat nosed plier to open the loop at the bottom of the earring hook, pop your charm of choice on, and close it! Note: we also have charms with skulls on. Just saying.

Beaded Hearts

Not enough heart shaped wire fun for you? These beaded hearts are so sweet – a bit more complicated to make, but luckily we’ve whipped them up in lots of lovely colours already so you can just grab them straight from us. You’re our valentine really, lucky thing!

Heart Charms

Another fun and easy jewellery make is just to pop one of these amazing charms on to a matching chain or sturdy piece of cord – then keep it for yourself. You’re the best.

There you have it, a whole host of things you could do this Sunday that don’t involve going outside or even opening the curtains. Add a large glass of wine and you’re kind of having the best day ever – win!

(P.S – we do have some secret actual Valentine’s cards to buy in the shop too – just don’t tell anyone.)

Posted on February 4, 2016February 22, 2021 by Mattie

New Kit: Pretty Jewellery Set

Introducing our newest jewellery making kit: the Pretty Jewellery Set!

This necklace & bracelet kit has been designed to fill the gap between our classic Kids Necklace/Bracelet Kits and our other range of making kits. For the age range who love to string beads and are capable of working with a slightly thinner thread and smaller bead size combination, Mattie had her almost 6 year old little girl in mind.

The kit is made up from a (obviously!) pretty selection of shiny 6mm plastic beads in either clear, pink or blue, and a beautiful rainbow selection of our crystal butterflies & shapes. These have already been attached to bails so no fiddly plier work, and you’ve got a sturdy cotton thread to string these on. Finished off with a chunky screw clasp to tie on so you can make it to any length you like and enough elastic to whip up a matching bracelet – we’re so pleased with this one!

Our kits come with full instructions to follow and so make an ideal gift for the budding jewellery making enthusiastic – no extra beads or tools are required, you get absolutely everything you need all packaged up beautifully.

You can grab one of these kits here. The difficult part is choosing which colour to start with…

Posted on January 28, 2016February 23, 2021 by Mattie

Exeter Trails

We can hardly believe Exeter Trails will be 3 years old this year! If you’re still not up to date with exactly what Exeter Trails is, here’s a brief overview.

Exeter Trails was a project launched in July 2013, and centres around 5 maps which depict over 100 independent businesses from the local area. The project was spearheaded by Bunyip’s Mattie, alongside traders and indie shopping enthusiasts from Cafe@36, The Real Food Store, Penny’s Recipes and No Guts No Glory. The maps cover 5 categories: Creativity, Food Glorious Food, Cafe Culture, Activities & Hobbies and Bygones & Boutiques.

The purpose of trails is obvious: getting as many people as possible to see the amazing array of shopping that Exeter has to offer if you step off the high street. Colourful cafes and beautiful boutiques are in abundance here – you just need to have the tools to find them. Walking through Exeter City Centre can sometimes feel like walking through any other town centre, but what sets us apart from everyone else are the home grown start ups, the local people selling what they love and the hidden gems down the back streets. The trails team believed (and still do!) that if only customers could find these shops, they’d love them.

The success of trails has been wonderful to see, and in the 3 years since then the maps have been updated and reprinted, and gone through an online revamp to a shiny new website. You can still grab the physical maps, with artwork designed by awesome local artist Philip Harris (check out more of his illustrations here) from all over the City – in the independent shops themselves, as well as in the Tourist Information Centre and Exeter Library.

You can also download all 5 maps from the website, and browse through all of the independent businesses featured. If you own an indie business locally, make sure that your page is up to date! You can claim your business and in turn edit your page, make it as beautiful as possible and even upload events and news. If you’re not sure how to do this, pop an email over to [email protected]. Let’s utilise this wonderful project, and fingers crossed for even more people finding all of Exeter’s fantastic independent offerings in the future.

Posted on September 28, 2015February 23, 2021 by Mattie

Our Newest Make – Multi Wear Jewellery

One of Mattie’s great strifes in life is the creation of jewellery you can wear more than one way. In our blog about bead weaving, one of the pieces mentioned was our extra long wrap around bracelet, that’s also long enough to be worn as one long necklace or as a double choker. There’s something so special about owning a piece of jewellery that you love, and being able to work it in a multitude of ways. It’s value for money, it keeps the piece interesting and it’s outrageously versatile.

So, drum roll, enter the newest Bunyip creation. A mix of resin, wood, glass and metal beads & charms, all linked together using wire and (very neat) wrapped loops. The beads are joined together by a length of chain at the back, making the whole necklace approx 90cm long. So far Mattie’s come up with two colour ways – choosing a favourite is the hard part.

The first way you can wear this piece is exactly like this – as one, lovely long chain necklace. And we continue….

Here’s the clever part. The chain at the back is attached with two lobster clasps, rather than normal jump rings. This means you can simply unclip the chain, and wear the beads as a shorter 18” necklace. Sweet! So you can just change it according to whether you’re going through a long necklace or a short necklace phase, which for me changes weekly. Unclipping the chain from the back also leaves you with a plain chain necklace to wear, which brings us up to 3 variations of wear so far.