Welcome to The Crafty Minx website!

January 2008: I was feeling a little blue. I’d just spent the holidays concocting an idea for a book about very simple crafts, for very impatient women (like me) who wanted a quick creative fix – yesterday. But then I had to go back to my job as a book publicist. With author tours and festivals stretching on ad infinitum and already feeling bone-tired, it seemed impossible to find extra hours in the day to write it.

A month later I got caught in a Suzy Homemaker moment, saying rather glibly to a friend “I just wish I could be at home with a baby, writing and making things.” A few days later I found out I was pregnant. And a few months after that I quit my job to work on the proposal for The Crafty Minx.

Fast-forward to September and the super-talented Kay Scarlett at Murdoch Books has just said yes to publishing it. “Hurrah,” I said to my husband James over an inch of celebratory champagne; four days before our daughter, Olive arrived. The book was due in January 2009.  I thought I might explode with happiness… then I wondered how on earth I was going to manage anything more challenging than washing my hair with a newborn.

Olive is now almost a year old, and The Crafty Minx just went to print about a week ago. Luckily James is a project manager and deftly handled my panic attack with a whizz-bang Excel spreadsheet that virtually wrote the book for me. And the sequel, which is out next year.

So to stop me itching for November to arrive, I’ve started this blog to share some of the new things I’m working on, as well as favourite suppliers and finds I hope people will enjoy and take inspiration from. Please let me know if you have any feedback and feel free to get in touch with your own handiwork, which I would love to see.  And stay tuned… we Crafty Minxes need to stick together, after all.