New images for spring

Ed working on the new screens for our next collection. Hopefully some of the products will reach the stalls and website this week.

Hunter Gatherers

Living in the countryside we have started foraging in the hedgerows for foodstuffs we can find growing wild. Our Shoe-making Landlady Chris has done spectacularly well on this front. Local fly tippers have deposited a load of pub snacks at the end of her road. Pictured is one weeks collection.

I'm partial to Sweet Roasted Almonds and Ed sings the praises of Gherkins in Anchovy Oil. I'm not sure what Chris' favourite is but as I keep finding half finished bar snacks cans she's clearly enjoying the fruits of her finds.

Making Screen Printing Frames

We've bought pre-made Screen printing frames before but find the ones we make ourselves last much longer. The pictures above show Ed adding the mesh to the frames. This is actually a two person job as you have to stretch out the mesh as tightly as possible, but I'm taking the photos here.

The worst thing about the job is putting all the staples in which leads to sore wrists, blood blisters and all sorts of other problems. So we're asking Santa for a Pneumatic Staple Gun.

Loglike

Our friends Jen and Steve who run Loglike used to have a stall at Spitalfields on Sundays but recently moved to North Wales. From the looks of their Blog they're having a great time.

Country living has already inspired new Loglike products. This set of badges is beautiful. Like all their products even just the packaging is gorgeous.

Print Day, Friday

Once again Friday was spent printing. Earlier in the week we cut the leather then we print invariably on Friday. Ed does the printing and I do the positioning both to print the items and to dry them while Ed prints the next item. When we've tried swapping roles it's always a disaster. I am always subject to Ed's very critical eye as I do his job but less skillfully, similarly I can't help interfering as I find him so slow with the positioning.

Anyway I position the pieces once printed to dry. As we have limited drying space you have to lay the pieces out as efficiently as possible so you tend to end up with a table covered in the same image. They always look so lovely at this stage it almost seems a shame to sew them up.

Hold the liquor

Our friend Huw has a shop in Brighton (they even sell some of our stuff) and a website; Junkfunk. Was nosing on his website this morning and spotted this nifty little item I hadn't seen before. It appealed to me.

Stabo goes Green for Winter, or is that Blue

It's that time of the year again, when it just gets a bit chilly. Less auspicious than the notorious 'first swallow of summer' is the 'first Thermals for winter'. That was quite a while back. We have now reached the stage of lots of layers and hats indoors.

As you can see the Stabo scarf is coming in very handy.

We love the weekend

Actually we don't love it that much but I thought a 'we hate the weekend' title might be too grumpy. In particular Friday nights are a bit of a drag as we always end up working late. This is what we were up to last night; screen printing. Ed tends to do the printing and I do the running around placing printed items on all spare spaces to dry out.

It wasn't too bad though we were made a glass of mulled wine and had a break watching fireworks. Of particular note were the sparklers, you don't realise quite how much smoke a sparkler gives off until to avoid the rain you light 5 of them in a small marquee.

There was a Jolly Hunter

This is not exactly Stabo related but has taken precedence over everything else.

We have a rat problem. They were getting into the house so our landlady boarded up the probable entrance and exit holes. Unfortunately she trapped at least one inside under the floorboards in our part of the house.

We tried to trap them last night but they managed to steal all the bait and safely go back down under the floorboards. Ed has decided that an air rifle is the solution to all our problems. I'm not quite sure how this is going to play out in the confines of our kitchen but it keeps us entertained.

Fantastic Mr Wallet

We are trying to sort out new products and photos for our website.

In particular the photography is rather labour intensive. Clothing is especially difficult to make look good which is why we are taking photos of t shirts on clothes hangers rather than people.


I spent a few hours faffing about with the light cube moving card holders by a couple of millimetres at a time in order to fit them perfectly in the frame. Inspired and greatly entertained by Fantastic Mr Fox perhaps we'll take our new skills in moving things by infinitesimal amounts and create a wallet based stop frame animation. Probably not.

We're at Coventry Transport Museum

We will be taking a stall at Coventry Transport Museum for their craft fair on November 14 & 15. We've never visited before but it sounds like a fun event and we have a bit of a penchant for transport related imagery.

We did visit an amazing transport museum on the North Island of New Zealand, just in case you happen to be passing. It's the Southward Car Museum fairly near Wellington.


We called in and fell in love with it. A vehicle we that particularly stuck in the mind was this gangster vehicle (below), imported from the states with reinforced bullet proof glass (ie glass about an inch thick) and authentic bullet holes.

What Would Terry Do?

I imagine Sir Terry Leahy, Tescos' Boss, when considering new display methods for say washing powder or charcoal brickettes probably sits down with his colleagues and has a conversation about previous displays. Then using the stunningly analytical technique of vague recollection rather than documented sales figures considers their success. On the back of this he probably grabs hold of a random collection of materials from his workshop and the floor then sits down at a sewing machine and gets stitching.

Even if it turns out not to be Tescos' strategy it's what we did.

So awaiting a tsunami of increased badge sales we will be presenting our new badge display to a suitably underwhelmed public this weekend at a stall near you.

Reduce, Reuse, and Remember to post a blog

In the spirit of regular blogging we posted our first blog about 2 months ago and have done nothing since. I think our problem was that we wanted to avoid posting blogs about the day to day minutiae of our work, unfortunately that left us with nothing to write about. Anyway my new Resolution is to Remember to post blogs and bang on about anything.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle the mantra of all keen environmentalists, or in our case when you decide to consolidate all the leather scraps you have been saving for the previous three years you realise quite how much you have collected. This in turn encourages you to seriously focus on Reducing the amount of space the scraps are occupying ideally by Reusing them and finding a new product to make from them. Preferably something small which only uses scraps and doesn't create further waste. Hence the recent inclusion of circular screen printed pin badges, shaped brooches and key fobs into the Stabo repertoire.

So be assured that whenever you buy one of these products you are doing something great for the environment albeit our environment as every badge sold gives us a little bit more room in our workshop.

The pictures show Ed using our press to cut out the badges at the end of the process. As you can see from the image to the right 'One of our dinosaurs is missing' where Ed got a bit over enthusiastic and threw the finished product in with the waste, our intention to use up rather than create waste hasn't entirely succeeded but we've made a start.
R