...yes we are still here, it has been a very weird few months since Christmas, 6 weeks of which I spent convinced I was going to die from this horrendous flu which everyone seems to have had so basically I did nothing at all except lie on the sofa while Rich bought me hot beverages and listened to me moan. My fav Christmas present of the year pretty much sums up the beginning of the year...

I can't tell you how happy this little cross-stitch makes me, as soon as we finish the studio it will hang by my desk to inspire me on a daily basis! If you interested in other work by this very talent lovely lady please check out her Etsy shop.

So not much has happend with the studio, although we did manage to get the curtains hung, we used copper pipes as the curtain poles which look fab (totally doing that again as its the same price as buying boring wooden ones!)

I need to turn the curtains up at the bottom but we love this original 60s fabric, it goes great with the other 60s off cut I got for the cushions for our chairs.

In chicken related news sadly our little grey Bluebell Wigwig dies a few weeks ago, frankly she never has been a particularly healthy chicken so it wasn't a total surprised (she's the one Richard picked...) so we decide to get our remaining lone chicken Homer some new friends.

We got a grey and white Speckledy we are calling Quatt and a ginger and black Black Rock called Hengoed (Henny), carrying on the weird tradition of naming our chickens after obscure Shropshire villages.

Homer hates them both...hopefully she's soften up eventually!

Rich has found some time in-between looking after me, to get the workshop/garage more sorted. We've been collecting vintage signs to goes with his 70s car obsession. He managed to get his work bench set up and finally all the car bits and pieces that have had to live in our very small cottage for the last 6 years can move out to the workshop where they can be properly used.

This is his new happy place, Im so glad he finally has it after years of planning. Its exactly a year ago this month that we broke ground to build this space, the whole time we where struggling through it I kept thinking it would be totally worth it once we could had the workshop and studio up and running. Although its still not finished completely its been one of the best things we've done and means we can stay in the little house we love in our fav area of Bath. We are very lucky to have all this!

How is it nearly Christmas?!?! We started the groundworks for the garage/studio literally 5 mins ago... it is terrifying how fast the last year has gone, oddly even though I know we have achieved a hell of a lot in 12 months it has felt like wadding through treacle at times.

We still have lots to do to get everything finished off, its all tantalisingly close but we keep having to stop and start due to work coming it, plus Richards poor back is only just holding it together so I hate to push him too hard but as he's the only real workforce for most of this we don't have much choice (poor baby!).
He made a start on my desk for the studio, we are waiting of a few parts coming in to finish it plus the small task of varnishing it so I don't end up riddled with splinters.

Yep I know the leg looks weird, this is temporary, we actually have some of the scaffold pieces which the builders left behind which I will use, Im just waiting on the fixings to arrive from good old eBay!

The best bit of working in the studio had been getting to play with the stove now the weather gone into proper winter! It smells amazing, unfortunately all the popping and creaking the flue makes scares the crap out of Stella so she refuses to come in anymore, just stands outside the doors meowing pitifully.

We took a break to get the house ready for Christmas last weekend, something we always enjoy! I love getting all our decorations out (they now have a HUGE box in the attic!) and thats just for the stuff that goes on the tree...

A few people have commented on our fake tree...yes it is plastic but out little Morso stove in the living room is perfectly capable of cooking a living tree to death within two weeks! Which is both depressing to watch and annoying with the amount of needles which they shed in their death throws! So fake is much better for our little cottage.

In between all this I have found some time to get a few new lino prints cut which are now available on my shop...

...and finally get my new tattoo to commemorate Rich and I having been together 18 years this year, which was how old I was when we started dating! I don't feel old enough for this to be the case but I am very proud of how far we've come together and this little life we've built for the two of us.

Looking forward to what 2018 will bring for me and this guy  x

Its been a while since I posted here, life suddenly got very busy but I've had a few people ask me how we are getting on with the studio so heres the update...we haven't actually got much more done since August! Ha!

Mostly we've had to do very boring stuff like get the workshop/studio signed off by building control (which is still on going!), Rich suddenly got loads of work come in at the beginning of September so has been pretty busy since then leaving very little time to do the fun stuff, also we are now pretty much out of cash so we either have to wait till we've earned it or try to get the bit and pieces we need as cheap as possible with take longer to source!

I did manage to get some new chairs for the studio, Rich had a very cool but unfortunately rather uncomfortable vintage office chair which wasn't giving his back enough support and I liked the idea of having matching chairs as both our desk will be totally different. I managed to get these of gumtree for £25 for the pair...

We also got the wood we need to make my new desk, we decided on OSB board which I really like the look of. We got a couple of sheets then glued them together to give me a thicker chunkier desk which looks more in proportion, so we glued it and laid flat in the workshop for a week to let the glue go off. Then we made the slight mistake a propping it up against a wall for a week and the wood bowed! So now my desk looks like this...

Its seems to have flattened out so hopefully it will be ok when we fit it which Im really hoping we can do this weekend.

I've been picking other bits up over the last 2 months, back in September I found these amazing original grey 1950s curtain in Shropshire for £60, they just about cover the studio doors which will help soften the rather hard edged breeze block walls and make it a bit cosier to work in the space after dark. Still haven't got round to fitting them as yet as we'll have to custom make the curtain pole needed.

The blue fabric above I got at the Frome vintage fair last weekend for £15, its the remnants of a 1950s curtain which should be more than enough to make cushions for the new office chairs.

We also picked up this super cool ammonite fossil from Dorset back in August which will look great in the studio (once I have somewhere to put it!).

Rich has also been working on the garage, he finally got the mezzanine level up so that we have storage for spare car parts and tools. This will mean we can finally empty my shed and Rich can eventually turn that into a print studio for me, we saved all the off cuts of insulation left over from the garage/studio so hopefully we have enough to get the shed done, theres just the small matter of clearing it out first! Anyway heres how the garage is shaping up...

We've also been collecting vintage sign that we'll put up when we get a mo.

Rich has some really cool ideas for this space and the car looks great in here, hes really looking forwad to being able to work on her in the try and warm which will make a nice change.

One of the other things that has kept me busy over the last few weeks has been building our new website and Facebook page, as we have our spanking new studio space Rich and I decided to join forces as artists. For the last month we've been taking part in Inktober over on Facebook, check us out if your feeling inclined!

So thats pretty much it for now, more soon. In the mean time heres a sleepy Stella for you...

What is this, two posts in one day?!?

So I had to cave in and buy a proper exspensive chicken coop, my lovely blue and white arched coop seems to shrink by the day as the chickens got bigger. It got to the point that they where sqeezing into the laying box, it also got slighlty fox attacked one night and although it stopped the fox the first time Im not sure it would have stopped a second attempt.

So I sprang for an Eglu...

Rich build a little stand for the house to keep it up out of the wet. Luckily we had tons of wood left over from the build so this little frame is made from off cuts.

They seem to like the new digs.

We are inching closer to being finished (as much as we are ever finished with any job) day by day. My god it feels like its taking forever and we are both now running pretty much on empty at this point and nursing bad backs. My apologies to friends and family who have been neglected this year!

We got the garage doors fitted a week or so ago, these where made by an brilliant father and son carpentry team who live just down the lane from us, we pretty much gave them free rein with the design (something we would normaly micromanage the hell out of) as we knew whatever they come up with would be good and we weren't disappointed! Rich spend several long days getting these painted and they look super smart now, it also means we can then work on fitting his workshop out over the winter.

We finally finished the studio floor (thank god as I've actually managed to also bugger up my hand scrapping all the tar off!), it was a lot faster to lay then clean but well worth the hassle and time.

And here is the new little Chilli Penguin stove Chilli Billi! Currently my favourite thing! This was supplied and fitted by the lovely people at The Fireplace Fitters Shop in Frome, they where our local supplied for the Chilli Billi which is specifically designed for yurts, garden studios and offices. These fantastic little stoves are all made in the UK in Wales, check our their website for their full range.

Its so cute!! The little enamel tea pot was from a car-boot sale and cost the princely sum for 50p.

Once the floor was down we filled all the joints with wood filler then several coats of varnish to made it more durable, Rich then got on with laying the tiles out in the little court yard. Again we somehow managed to pick a product that was really fiddly to lay, note to future self, diamond pavers look great but are total shit to grout into place as you have to clear the grooves so the rain water can run off to the drain. Im not going to lie, I chose these because they look nice and never once considered them from a practicality point of view (Sorry Rich!).

Rich then spent a day trying to sort out the lighting in the studio (which had been hook up slighly wrong meaning the one indoor light only came on when you flicked the switch for the outdoor light!).

We always wanted to use vintage industrial lights (some of which we've been collecting for years!) we teamed this with neon colouring wiring in different colours and we both have a thing about neon (can you tell we are children of the 80s?)

The first light is a soviet era Russian explosion proof lamp, the glass is nearly an inch thick and weights a bloody ton. As couldn't hang this from the apex of the ceiling due to the enormous steel beam holding the roof up I came up with the idea of buying a shop sign hanging bracket and using that, for a rather random idea I would say it worked out pretty well.

The second light is a British made bulk head light from a munitions factory, Rich brought this nearly 2 years ago because he thought it was cool and it been waiting for its moment ever since.

But I think this is my favourite...

This lamp came from a car-boot sale in Shropshire over 20 years ago, it was bought by my Dad and used in his shed for years. When he died my Mum gave me the lamp and we kept it to one day use in our finished studio. Rich rewired it with neon yellow flex then he added the giant green switch box you can see under it. This is an on/off switch from some factory machinery which again came from a junk shop for couple of quid, it makes to most amazingly satisfying 'CLUNK' sound when you hit the button to turn the light on. I think Dad would have loved that.

Heres the boy enjoying his desk in its new home! We've had this 1940s desk for over 10 years, its probably the only bit of furtiture that we've held on to, when you where orginally looking at houses to buy I used to walk around with the desk measurments written down, if the house didnt have a space for it it was off the list.

So there we have it for now, we haven't finished by a long stretch, we still need to move my desk into the space and put shelving up but for now at least its actually starting to feel like a proper graphics studio.

Im off for a cup of tea an a nap!

So we finally got rid of our builders which means we can thankfully stop making endless bacons sandwiches and tea, the garage/studio is built, now we just have to small task of decorating and landscaping to do....shouldn't take too long right?

It's taken about 6 weeks and several false starts but we finally have the studio doors on, these where a last minuet alterations to our plans as originally we didn't think we had the budget to do double glass doors but our builders happened to mention that they had some high spec grey doors that had be ordered for another job and then the client decided they didn't like them. So we managed to bag £3000 worth of doors for £1000 fully fitted!

We also had to have the steps going down rebuilt as the hights where slightly off and I kept tripping going up them!

We have the walls of the little courtyard at the back now painted white, it was going to be rendered but again money constrains stopped this so we just painted it to match the inside of the studio.

We've also made a start on laying the reclaimed parquet flooring, I managed to score this of eBay for just £10! The slight down side is its taking bloody ages to clean off each piece ready to lay but we are really happy with how it looking...

We decided to lay it at a slight angle across the room, although the room is square (not something we are used to with our 300 year old cottage!) we just felt it would add a more modern edge to have it run at 30 degrees.

We have the stove guys booked for the end of this month which is why this corner got done first, Im soooo excited about getting the stove in, cant wait to play with it!

The sexy german gutting has also gone up which lead to this whatsapp conversation with The Mothership and Sis...

...shes very proud!

Despite how complicated looking all the parts where when in the box this was surprisingly easy to fit and look 100 times better than plastic. We have used plastic on the other side but as you cant really see it as it butts up to next door so closely we though we'd save some pennies.

We have also finally got the trench that we dug for all the electric and cat 6 cables filled in, thank god! We both kept falling in it repeatedly, I actually though Rich had broken his leg at one point but no just really bad bruising from hip to knee!

Unfortunately 3 months of soil piled high has killed quite a few plants and pretty much all the grass, as we cant now afford turf rolls we are falling back on grass seed and time. It does make the place seem a bit bleak however.

Despite everything else happening I have managed to get some veg in, Victoriana Nursery once again coming to my rescue and sending lots of parcels of lovely plants.

Im experimenting with growing beans up the fence of the chicken coop as Im not a bit pushed for space, so far so good.

So thats it for not, just a few jobs to be geeting on with...lots more scraping of parquet blocks, pouring the courtyard floor to get the correct hight, lay the pavers, steps and capping stomes, digout the garden at the top of the studio steps to make a seating area, fit out the garage, fit garage doors, wire up lighting in both garage and studio then move office in...just one or two things to do then!

By the end of this week we should (hopefully) have finished the major building work, theres still a ton of work to do, decoration, fitting lights, fitting out work benches not to mention the huge amount of re-landscaping we now have to do to get the garden back. But in all if feels like a huge achievement, this time last year we were still doodling plans on old envelopes!

Heres where we are at...

  We are super happy with the roof, the whole garage has been build to house standards so its probably way over spec for just a garage but seeing as how we will be spending a huge amount of time in the building it makes sense. We have some cool galvanised guttering going on end of the week which should look great next to the grey soffit boards.

The studio is a great space, I so glad we went for a larger door way opening though, with a normal sized door it would have felt like a cell! It was really hard to get a good pic of the space before we painted it will all the scaffolding plus it looked super dark!

As we weren't plaster boarding the walls but painting the breeze blocks we had to paint before the electrics went in as they were all surfaced mounted, this led to a few late night painting sessions as we raced the electricians!

The electrical truncking is all factory grade, so super tough which is great for the garage/workshop plus looks cool as hell! Who knew we would get so hung up on things like switches and plug sockets!

Since then it just been enless painting, if I never have to paint another breeze block wall again it will be too soon!

I managed to pick up these galvanised outdoor lights from eBay for a bargain, they will go on each end of the building.

Also from eBay is this amazingly cool Russian military lamp which we hope will go in the studio. Unlike the aluminium outdoor lamps this bastard has quarter of an inch thick explosion proof glass so it weighs a ton.

And lastly heres the stove we are hoping to have fitted, its handmade by a little firm in Wales called Chilli Penguin, these mini 2kw models are designed for yurts and garden offices so its perfect for what we need it for....plus its called a Chilli Billy, how cute is that!!

Its taken two and half weeks but the block work is finally done, there was one or two little hold up including us changing our mind at the last minuet about the hight of the courtyard wall which is the main access down to the studio/office at the back of the building. Our brickies have been superb, they done an incredibly neat job and we couldn't be more happy with it.

It looks a little bit massive and overbaring right now but Im sure will look better once all the small details are added like a roof and garage doors! Work on the roof begins tomorrow.

While this has been happening Richard I are trying to source stuff to finished the studio off, I managed to bag a bargin on ebay and got us 25 meters of parquet flooring for just £10! Just the small task of sorting it all and giving it a quick clean up. This will hopefully be the new office floor, we dont need anything like the full 25 meters so Im hoping to sell off what we dont use.

This is currently living in our kitchen while I clean it all, so no sitting at the table for a meal for us for a while!

We have being going to car boot sales and rec yards looking for lights since the start of the build, of course now I need them all the cool old lighting seems to have disappeared or shot up in price so not much luck lately. During this weeks sunday morning boot sale hunt I did pick up this coffee sack with the coolest designs on I ever seen, Im now think of making this part of a door curtain for the new studio.

I also scored some new pans, my old ones where fine (Ive had them for 11 years) but just very devode of 70s flower patterns so they are being rehomed at the local charity shop.

Its been an exciting/frustrating/pressured few weeks and I'm looking forward to everything no longer being covered in brick dust.

The last 10 day have been a bit of a blur, suddenly we have walls, lots of walls...

We decided to have both the office and the garage double skin insulated, our Brickies think this is very posh! Its apparently not something you normally do with a garage but as Rich plans to spend quite a bit of time working in there and our brilliant buildlers quoted the same for double skins as other guys quoted for single it seemed like it was worth investing in.

My easter holiday has been spend scouring ebay and the local Rec yards for lights, flooring, patio pavers and a log burning for the office. Why is it as soon as you need this stuff you cant find anything you like! Heres the light collection so far...

So all in all its going well, hopefully they will be starting the roof end of next week! Fingers crossed!

Garage progress has been somewhat slow, we ended up waiting a week for the structural engineer to come back with his calulations for reinforcing the walls to cope with the pressure of the ground on them. But things are moving again this week, the steps down to the back of the building which will be the office are being put in.

Hopefully with the good weather the concrete will dry out quickly. We need to go shopping for flag stones for the little court yard and the steps going into it next, also fencing, capping stones and parquet flooring!

So our entire world is revolving around this 9 meters of garden, I literally have no other topic of conversation at the moment!