Weekly update - books and bags

I'd love to have a new dress to show you, but the dress I've been working on this week is nowhere near completion. I'm making a sort of 20s/30s inspired gown with beautiful soft draped silk, which is notoriously difficult to work with so I'm taking it slowly.

I rearranged my studio (again) this week, mostly to take advantage of the one corner in the room where the wifi works well. I also got my sewing machine serviced and then put some more stickers on it to make it pretty. The stickers came from Rookie Yearbook Two, which I bought this week along with the A Beautiful Mess book.

The Rookie Yearbook is basically a printed anthology of rookiemag.com's content from the past year, and it is so wonderfully designed (it kind of looks like a giant handmade zine). The other book is a 'photo idea book' from the creators of the A Beautiful Mess blog, Elsie and Emma. It's full of pretty pictures and ideas for mixing up your photography style - should be useful for whenever I run out of blogging ideas!

My other favourite purchase this week is this beautiful bag from Brit Stitch. As the name suggests, it's a British company, and the story behind it is so cute. A leathermaker in England made a bag for the local milkman to carry his cash in, and 45 years later, the milkman came back to ask for a new strap - he'd been using the bag for all those years and it was still in good condition! They now make the 'milkman' style in all sorts of pretty colours and now that I have one of my own, I do get the feeling that it will last a very long time. The leather is so thick and sturdy and the hand stitching is perfect.

Finally, in the 'sounds ridiculous, looks adorable' category, there's this travel agent for stuffed animals. You send them your toys, they take photos of them living it up in Tokyo and upload the photos to facebook for you to enjoy. Oh Japan, don't ever change.

There won't be much of an update next week, because my friends are arriving from Australia on Saturday and we'll be too busy having fun. I will schedule a quick post to go up while we're away, though.