A little tidy up in the craft room today revealed a few things I’d like to share – a new obsession, an unexpected gift, a rediscovery. You know, the sort of things that somehow get buried under piles of cut material, scraps of paper, notebooks, filing that needs doing…oh no? Your room isn’t like that? Damn.

I’ve been buying lots of zips lately. Mostly I only need one or two for particular projects but since I found Zipperstop I’m compelled to buy by the dozen, in several different lengths and colours. The trouble is that they ship so quickly and the postage is so reasonable that it’s far too easy to just think ‘oh I’ll get a dozen of those as well’. I’m even contemplating buying the colour card so that I can properly feed my new addiction. How many zips in the stash is too many zips? Actually I don’t think you can have too many zips, even if you don’t have plans for them right now. One day you will.

I got this for my birthday. My friend has become obsessed with artist’s resin, and the suspension of things therein. He has cast jelly beans, flowers, fruit, sausages, butter… and of course hooks. I’m not even sure he knew what I would do with it when he gave it to me, but as soon as I held it I thought ‘pattern weight!’ Ideally I’d have several to pin down pesky tissue paper patterns, but one is a good enough start and might let me leave the button jar on the shelf sometimes. It’s a lovely thing, and entirely unique.

I also unearthed a bag of goodies from Japan, and was delighted to find these in there. They are face blotting papers (aburatorigami), and powder papers from a lovely shop in Kyoto called Yojiya, which will save me from having a big old shiny face this week. We went shopping on our last day, and ended up in there looking at the beautiful makeup brushes and cosmetics, but I only bought dozens of these as gifts for everyone. And myself of course. It brought back such lovely memories of that day, just looking at the packaging, because it was the same day I stumbled upon Linnet, having not realised that their shop was in Kyoto. There is a part of me that is tempted not to use these papers, and to keep them safe and unused, but what is the point of preserving something that is meant to be used? And besides which, if I do use them I’ll have an excuse to go back. (Although can you imagine that conversation? ‘We need to go to Japan because I’ve run out of facial blotting paper.’)

Other than that I have been laid out in front of my industrial fan watching the tennis, and this might be the pose I adopt for the rest of this heatwave. Hopefully you’re all finding ways to keep cool if you’re in it too