studio loo | christmas artist's open house brighton and hove

We are very excited to be back at Studio Loo this winter for the Christmas Open Houses. We were part of the May Open House and it was so much fun, there was delicious homemade cake, tasty rhubarb drinks for none tea drinkers (me!) and a whole host of awesome work!

Just off the main road, and next to the school, you can't miss it! 

Tasty Rubarb drink I mentioned!

This time round you can find these awesome designer makers!

designosaur (obvs) | Claire Potter Design | Penelope Kenny | Kate Forrester | Claire Cameron-Smith | The Intrepid Camera Co |Vivienne Ridley | Chris Murphy | Hello DODO | Parkminster Candles | Rarebit Design | Peter James-Field | Mark Reeve – Piano Planetarium

Our designosaur set up!

Planters by Chris Murphy

Beautiful jewellery by Vivienne Ridley

when you visit between 11am – 5pm on:

Sat 21st – Sun 22nd November

Sat 28th November

Sat 5th December

Sat 12th – Sun 13th December. 

We will be there this Saturday 21st between 11-2pm, so if you want to have a chat with Jacques and I, then come along then!

Claire Potters Edible City Guide, great for marking your foraging hot spots!

You know we love these dispensers, this one contains seedballs and is only 20p a go! How cool is that?

Obviously all the photos are from the summer open house, as the Christmas Open House hasn't started yet! But we can promise that it will be even better, as you have these designers featured and more!

The Studio will be stuffed full of fun gift ideas, and Claire has a fantastic eco design ethos which means that items are made from sustainable materials, or are organic, have been upcycled or designed with their life span carefully thought through!

A Minor Bird by Mark Reeves, made from old piano keys, there are Piaon People too!

Need directions? You can find us at Studio Loo, 201 Portland Road, Portslade, Hove BN3 5JA.

Make sure you chat to Claire herself, it's so fun hearing about where all the different parts of the Studio came from and her restoration story! This is a really quirky and awesome space filled with quirky and awesome products, I'm not sure what else you could want?

See you on Saturday,

ROAR!

Karli

back once again for the renegade craft fair

This weekend we were at Renegade Craft Fair for the fourth year running! There are always a huge amount of round up posts that go round so we thought we'd get ours up before you were sick of reading them!

Our new beaver vending machine filled with newly designed charms and DIY bracelet kits

Our new display is all the colours of the rainbow!

#squadgoals
i Like CATS | Woah There Pickle | designosaur | hello DODO | Juream Box | Oh Someday 

We were very lucky this year that most of the Brighton crew were placed next to each other so we were able to create a HUGGGGEEEE Brighton booth space which contained Woah There Pickle, i Like CATS, hello DODO and ourselves, next to us were the wonderful Jureum Box and Oh Someday too.

Juream Box hand dies all these super soft gorgeous products in the most beautiful ombre brights!

YUK FUN had lots of new things, dresses, crop tops, make up bags! All the joy!

I got the most awesome gift from Ruth and Brendan aka i am acrylic, a little cheese ring! I'll put a photo up on instagram soon, when it's not so greeyyyyyyy outside.

Zodiac signs by Oh Someday, this are much more delicious in real life! Poor Kate is doing exactly the same markets as us this season, so you can catch her when you see us!

Keith made it to the blog as he won the "Best Male Salesperson" Award for looking after Sally from Hand Over Your Fairy Cakes stall, you should check out her stuff, it's awesome and none of it is shown here... (sorry Sally!)

Renegade, for those of you that have not been before is the biggest and bestest Craft Fair in the UK, it's an established event in the USA and they now run two events a year, here in London in the ever trendy Shoreditch.

Now the problem with my round up posts each year is that we are normally so busy behind our own stall that there isn't much time to escape to go and visit all the other awesome people that are there, BUT we did manage to run around on the Sunday afternoon (when everyone is looking frazzled and sweaty) to say hello to some of our faves and online friends that we only get to see during craft fair season! Obviously they are the most colourful too!

Pygmy Cloud's new egg cups, I want to know if you get the googly eyed egg included?

And Smile had the most beautiful booth! All the colour and Viktorija always has a massive grin on her face!

Kirstin Stride is part of the Brighton Massive! Check these cute little birdy necklaces, each one is individually hand drawn!

If you came along to see us, play with our new machine, and stroke the dinosaurs, then thank you, it was awesome to see you, we have two more markets coming up, The Brighton Etsy Christmas Market and Crafty Fox, find out more by clicking on them!

Woah There Pickle's crazy new Chrtistmas cards and fun prints. She's got sweetie Christmas decorations too!

Deborah Ballinger's stall is an awesome mix of BRIGHT and stylish, mexican themes running though her new Christmas range.

Cute brightly coloured vinyl decorated bottles by Ladybird Likes

Stall buddies, hello DODO's new dinosaur baby wear! Mini clothes for mini people! They are doing ALL of the fairs, so make sure you catch them!

Hopefully see you all before Christmas,

ROAR!

Karli

etsy video filming | behind the scenes

​Now you may remember a few months back we were doing so top secret filming!

We can now tell you that we were filming with Etsy to create this little video!

It's part of a series of four videos Etsy has made to help sellers to improve their Etsy shops. You can find the whole series here.

I wanted to do a little behind the scenes post so you can see what it takes to make a little video like this...

Amanda the producer, Danny the cameraman and Parker, Etsy Admin and presenter for the day, arrived at our home studio at 8am, half an hour before scheduled so I arrived at the front door with half my make up done! Luckily they needed to grab a few extra bits from the car so that gave me a bit longer to get my face on!

We started to chat about what a regular day looks like and went through the list of shots they had planned. It was a hot sunny day hence the shorts and tee, and we filmed all morning until we started to get hungry and wilt a little.

Lunch time and we headed down to Iydea for some delish grub! It was only a short break and dip into the North Laine, before heading back to work.

We did some shots outside the front of designosaur HQ where we were constantly stopped by passers by jumping into the shot before heading to the laser cutting studio to get some shots of Jacques working on the laser cutter.

Finally we finished down by the Pier, Jacques and I looking out to sea, we hadn't seen each other all day, and were catching up, but this got us in trouble with the director for talking too much!

It was a long day and we were finished around 8pm. Filming is tiring but we hope you love the end result as much as we do.

If you want to find out more about the project, you can have a read on the Brighton Etsy Team blog.

ROAR!

Karli and Jacques

PS It's impossible to take photos whilst you're being filmed ;)

etsy european captains' summit in amsterdam.

I saw this and it seemed so poignant.

​

"Another summit, I'm sick of hearing about them!"
I'm sorry if you feel that way, it's the last one of 2015 so you can breathe a sigh of relief! I am now a summit vetren, and in fact, I think I have been to the most Etsy Summits out of everyone ever, including Etsy Admins. There have been nine summits in total and I've been invited to, and attended seven of them.

It's always so exciting arriving outside of the summit, you never know what is behind those doors!

"But why do you keep going Karli? And what can you get out of going to the same thing seven times!?!"

I've been Captain of the Brighton Etsy Team for two years now, when I went to the first summit back in February 2014 I was a newbie captain and we had a fairly newly activated team, but this aside I still did a talk on leadership in my team, as I was asked to do so.

It spiraled from there, I was then invited to do the same talk at the upcoming, French, German and UK Summits and just a few months back I was whisked to Melbourne, Australia to do it again!

Building our agenda together.

Chad Dickerson himself giving an awesome introduction, which we were told not to repeat ;)

I'm very passionate about the team, we've achieved so much from a Christmas market to a Pop Up shop, from talks to meet ups with over 50 people, which I wouldn't have been able to do without some awesome leaders and extremely talented team members.

So this summit was an open agenda, and most of Etsy's senior staff were there including the CEO himself (we periscoped!) I didn't have to present and so I did a lot of listening. I soaked it all up and chatted away to new captains and experienced captains about the ins and outs of the Brighton Etsy Team.

Break out session with some awesome captains!

Some of my faves from the UK! These girls got it going onnnnnn!

It's said all the time that you never stop learning, and it's so true. I could go to another seven summits and I'm sure I'd get as much out of it as the very first one.

Thanks for having me Etsy, I learnt a lot and I'm excited to put it into practice.

ROAR!

Karli

PS If you want to read more about the summit you can find another post on the Brighton Etsy Team blog.

designosaur jewellery making workshop | early bird tickets released!

Hello!

I've had a short break from this here blog, and that is mainly because this little blog and the rest of the designosaur webspace will be moving soon, don't worry we'll let you know all the details when it happens and we'll try and make it as pain free as possible!

BUT enough excuses, we have a BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! If you are a newsletter subscriber (if you're not, you're missing out and you can sign up here) you will have seen that after the success of our first workshop for the Etsy Blogger Sleepover, we are now doing our very first workshop for you guys!

It's going to be on the 24th October, at 4pm at the ever so awesome Lick Warehouse. You can get your hands on cheaper Early Bird tickets here!

So get your mates together and get excited to make your own designosaur charm necklace! We'll also fill you with sugary treats and will be making some signature alcoholic and non alcoholic cocktails for you all!

It'll be quite the party and we can't wait to hang out!

ROAR!

Karli (and Jacques)

toft | collaboration

Heyyy!

We don't tell you enough about the awesome commissions that we do, so we are going to be sharing more about them, starting... frommmmm..... NOW!

Toft is a shop in Rugby,UK based on an Alpaca Stud farm that sells, yarns, kits and gifts. You should follow them on instagram as they post plenty of photos of fluffy alpacas!

Kerry, Toft's founder got in touch with us as she had seen our work before, she mentioned that all of the office were huge fans, and with that kind of flattery how could we say no? (how to get us to work with you 101 - compliments, lots of them)

Kerry wanted us to create an Alpaca necklace that could be sold exclusively through the Toft shop. We came up with a few designs along with some different chain options (different weights, lengths and styles) and sent the samples off to Toft.

These are the bad boys that were selected. There's a cute little alpaca necklace with engraved hooves and eyes and then a slightly larger version with a knitted jumper texture as the alpacas fluff!

We love taking on fun new projects so if you have something in mind get in touch!

ROAR!

Karli (and Jacques)

#etsybloggersleepover

YO!

I'm sorry if you're sick to death of hearing about all things Etsy but being the Brighton Etsy Team Captain means that I eat and breathe all things Etsy!

This event was a little different however and not something we had tried before!

This is what being a blogger looks like. Behind the Scenes!

Eight fashion and lifestyle bloggers were invited down to Brighton for the weekend with EtsyUK to get a behind the scenes peak into the life and work of a Etsy Seller!

It was a small event which we held at the Lick Warehouse (damn those guys are SO COOL), which also meant we got to munch delicious fro yo. YUM. The wonderfully talented, absolute G that is Claire from In The Making, styled the whole event for us, from making luscious looking co-working tables to beautiful copper mobiles, she's literally a genius, she also styled the Brighton Etsy Pop Up shop.

One of the desk spaces with Oh Someday, Cat-a-Cake Creations and i Like CATS, on the other station were B Millinery, hello DODO and Rock Cakes.

Toby can't spell...

I've mentioned before that the Brighton Etsy Team Leaders are a talented bunch plus Georgie St Clair who we haven't quite convinced to be a leader yet but whose second time it was running her beautiful flower collage workshop with the team!

We ran our very first workshop, a dinosaur charm bracelet and necklace workshop where you could choose a range of dinosaurs in a range of colours to create your very own designosaur jewellery! The bloggers were a talented bunch and Lucy from Shiny Thoughts even created some dinosaur tassels for her camera!

You can check out Hannah Gales pastel creation here too!

It was a really fun day full of Pink Lemonade (thanks Hen Restaurant, that stuff is delish!) painting, stamping, printing and camera clicks!

This is Rockcakes eating some yogurt, she's probably going to totally kill me for putting this up on the internet BUTTTT I think it's hilarious. (sorry)

Want to see more serious photos and more sensible writing? You can check out this post on the team blog!

So if you think that a designosaur workshop looks like fun, sign up to our mailing list so you can find out our very first date and be the first to book a place!

ROAR!

Karli