Hello? Is anybody still there?

Now, where was I? I just popped away from my blog for a minute, got distracted, and now it appears three years have gone by. How does that happen?

I'm not really sure. I've posted occasional weirdness on the Kitsch and Curious Facebook page, and I have pinned like the very devil on Pinterest, but I just haven't really been in the mood to write much.

A few finds I just couldn't resist.

But now I'm here again, and I suppose I ought to keep you up to date. Well. a few things have changed since my last post. I've moved house, for one thing. Mr Kitsch and I decided to leave Bristol, and move a few miles away, to the lovely seaside town of Clevedon.  Well, I say 'seaside', but to be more accurate, the dull brown water we can just see from the window of our flat is actually the Bristol Channel. But Clevdon has a beach and a pier and seaweed and gulls and ice-cream, so I think that counts as the seaside. And it has great sunsets...

When we moved in 2013, my plan was to give up selling vintage and concentrate on handmade craft makings. Yes, well...somehow, that didn't happen, as I kept going through my endless collections and thinning them out. The local charity shops received a lot, but I've also sold some too. My Kitsch and Curious Etsy shop has waxed and waned depending on how ruthless I was feeling.

Our flat is small, and I don't have room to keep much stock, so I still intend to wind down the vintage shop eventually. I'll never be a minimalist, but as well as a lack of space, a lack of funds has made me reconsider some of my collecting habits. Paying for a storage unit, as we did for some time, makes you think long and hard about the value of keeping some bits of vintage kitsch, just for the hell of it.

No, I'm not totally reformed...

So, although my shelves are still loaded,  I've reformed my vintage-collecting ways a fair bit in the last couple of years. But when I was feeling hard done by because I couldn't go vintage shopping, I received wonderful random things from people's attics or fabric stashes. Both from friends in blogland and in real life. You know who you are and I thank you.

I'm also immensely grateful for all the other support from family and friends in the past couple of years. Our financial situation has been up and down and is still a bit precarious, but we're still afloat. In some ways, I quite like the simplicity of not being able to spend money - there are less decisions to make. And we're not starving (far from it - as evidenced by my expanding waistline!).

I've been making textile jewellery and some other craft pieces, and I plan to have a new Etsy shop for those very soon. This photo is of some of the prototypes I made last year, but I think the newer ones are better.

So now I feel ready to share my collecting and making again. But is there anybody out there to share with? I'd really appreciate a quick comment or 'Hello', if you've found this blog.