6 reasons you should buy handmade if you want to give the perfect gift

Lets face it, in this day and age of modern convenience, of Amazon Prime and Poundland, the vast majority of people are used to buying stuff cheaply and having it arrive very quickly. And in many situations, that is brilliant. I know I rely a lot on Amazon Prime for the speed of delivery and the wide range of options available; and Poundland and its ilk are perfect if, for example, you want to buy cheap birthday presents for the many many kids (and there are very very many!) whose parties your own children are invited to attend.

But what to do when it comes to the special occasions? Getting a gift suitable for a big birthday, a significant anniversary, or a very special person who means a lot to you, is a more difficult matter, where you might not want to rely on the big names and the discount stores. You want something different, something special, something personal. And that is why the handmade gift industry is currently big business - consumers are demanding something more.

Here are a few reasons why you should buy handmade if you want to give the perfect gift for a special occasion:

1. You want to get them something that nobody else will get them - no matter how perfect that candlestick from John Lewis is for your mum, you can't be sure that Auntie Marjory won't have bought her the same thing. (Or, knowing my mum, that she won't have bought it for herself!) And nobody likes having to wait in line to return an unwanted present. Buying handmade from a small business will help to ensure that the gift you give is truly unique.

2. You want to give a gift that will make them say "wow!" Often, handmade gifts will be things you can't find in the shops, so they will be things that they've never seen before. Novelty (not in the cheap tacky sense) is a great way to ensure the gift you give will be memorable. There are many very high quality handmade gifts to be found, which definitely have a wow factor you'd struggle to find on the high street.

3. You want to get them something personal, that means something specific to them. Whether it's something with their name on it, or a reference to their favourite chocolate, or an in-joke, buying a personal handmade gift really makes the person feel special - you've taken the time to think about what they'd like most, and gone to the trouble of having it specially made for them. That's a sure way to make the person you're giving the gift to feel really special - and earn yourself mega brownie points too!

4. You can get exactly what you want. The big businesses only make certain styles of items, and keep costs low by only offering you limited choices. But small businesses often make each item from scratch when someone wants it, so it's no bother to make it a different colour for you, or to change the wording. So it's possible to get an item absolutely tailor-made to your requirements.

5. Buying from a small business makes the small business owner very happy. You're not buying from a faceless corporation with a dodgy record of paying its taxes. You're buying from a real person and your purchase will make a real difference to that person's life. It might help them pay for their kids' extra curricular activities, a dinner out with their spouse, or fund their ever-increasing addiction to fabric (which is not something I suffer from, no matter what Mr Gecko might say...) At the very least, you will put a smile on their face because when you pour your heart and soul into your creations, it's an amazing feeling to know that other people love them!

6. You're helping the small business owner live their dream! There are many reasons people start a handmade gift business - a passion for doing what they love; a way to make money while fitting in around family life; a way of contributing to life and feeling useful even if they can't go out to a "normal" job because of health reasons - and every item you buy from them helps them in ways you can't even imagine. 

So yes, buying handmade might not be as quick as Amazon Prime, and it might not be as cheap as Poundland, but you'll get something infinitely better. Which surely makes handmade excellent value - in the true sense of the word.

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My business, Gecko Fabric Art, offers a range of beautifully made quilted items which can be customised to your requirements with bespoke appliqué designs. Mug rugs, notebook covers, wall hangings, cushions, Kindle cases, make up bags and more, each made from scratch just for you with a design created just for you. I'm always delighted to discuss custom creations, so please do get in touch if there are any gifts you need help with!

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jenny@GeckoFabricArt.co.uk 

Geckos on Tour: How to Handle Holidays with Kids (yes, wine is required)

Well, we've just got back from a week's holiday in Dorset. Which is a long way from our home in Manchester, especially when the traffic jams double the length of the journey!

So I thought I'd share you my Gecko Top Tips for how to handle a holiday with children (ours are 5 and 7, for reference).

Here we go:

1. Don't forget to pack the coffee machine. Even if you have to leave one of the kids behind, you really can't spend a whole week without decent coffee. You just can't.

2. Don't forget to pack some wine. This is almost as important as the coffee machine. But not quite, as it is likely there will be some form of shop in the vicinity of where you are staying that will be able to sell you some wine. But it's better to take some with you, just in case. 

3. If you don't have them already, get DVD players for the car. And headphones. The headphones are very important. We spent a 9 hour car journey with hardly any interruptions from the back of the car because they were quite content to watch the SAME FILM on repeat. For 9 hours. And we couldn't hear it because of the headphones. Perfect!

4. Remortgage your house before you go, so you'll be able to afford all the extortionate entry fees into the tourist attractions.

5. Remember to smile sweetly when your darling children would rather play on the playground than actually look at the really exciting monkeys you paid a lot of money to see (please see point 4). Apparently yelling "I did not pay £38 for you to play on a playground! Look at the sodding monkeys for 5 sodding minutes at least before you go down the slide!" makes you look like a lunatic.

6. Resign yourself to the fact that your children's diet will mostly consist of ice cream for the week. Which will, by the way, also almost bankrupt you, because it's fancy, locally made with milk from golden cows, tourist ice cream. And they'll only have about a third of it before deciding they're full / feel sick. Typical. (But on the plus side, at least you get to finish it off.)

7. Make sure you pack lots of plasters, because children who are stuffing their faces with ice cream can't see where they're going, and so they'll fall over. A lot.

8. If you can manage it, stay at a place with a hot tub. A hot tub will keep the kids entertained for ages with very little input required from you. Sure, there may be the occasional "she tried to drown me" incident to sort out, but on the whole that's a small price to pay for 10 minutes of peace.

9. Don't, whatever you do, try to visit any place that doesn't have at least 2 out of the following: an adventure playground, an ice cream shop, a beach, funfair rides. The continuous wailing of "you never take us anywhere nice, we never get to do what we want to do" will essentially make the whole trip miserable and you'll wish you hadn't bothered.

10. And last but not least, make sure you take and share lots of photos of your kids having fun and being cute, so you can make your non-holidaying friends jealous at how perfect your family holiday is. If you take enough photos, you can even convince yourself that you had an amazing time and that the kids were really well behaved - which is when you decide to do it all again next year!

(N.B: By the way, in case anyone is worried, we did actually have a lovely holiday in Dorset. We must have done - we have loads of photos of the kids having fun and being cute.)


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For Harry Potter Geeks Only...

I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep the other night, and I randomly remembered having read the alternative Harry Potter titles as seen from Draco Malfoy's perspective. It got me thinking about what they would be from the other characters' perspectives too...

...and my night time musings turned into this! What do you think? Do you have any other suggestions? I'd love to hear them!

Harry Potter...	Ron Weasley...	Hermione Granger...	Lord Voldemort...	Albus Dumbledore...
...and the Philosopher's Stone	...and the Chess Grand Master	...and They Wouldn't Have Managed It Without Me	...and the Suffocating Turban	…and the Blatant Fixing of the House Championship to Ensure Gryffindor Wins
...and the Chamber of Secrets	...and the Backfiring Slugs	...and They Wouldn't Have Worked It Out Without Me	…and The Secret Diary of Tom Riddle, Aged 15¾	...and the Crucial Moment Gardening Leave
...and the Prisoner of Azkaban	…and WTF Has a Grown Man Been Doing Pretending to be a Rat, Living in My Bedroom for 13 Years? Where's Operation Yewtree When You Need It?	...and I Can't Believe They Didn't Figure It Out Sooner	...and – Oh Shit I'm Not in This One	...and the Sirius Black to the Future
...and the Goblet of Fire	...and the Great (Mermaid) Escape	...and Ooh, an International Quidditch Player, Did You Say...?	...The Return	...and the Failed Background Check
...and the Order of the Phoenix	...and the Emotional Range of a Teaspoon	...and I Told You So Harry	...and Ssh! Nobody Knows I'm Back Yet!	...and the Hunt for a Sodding Defence Against the Dark Arts Teacher is Really Starting to Grate...
...and the Half Blood Prince	...and the Keeper, the Girlfriend and the Love Potion	...and How the F*** is Harry Beating Me at Potions?	...and My Cunning Plan to Use a Teenager to Do Something that even the Baddest of Bad-Ass Dark Wizards have Failed to Do (Hey, It Kinda Worked...)	...and the Torture Potion
...and the Deathly Hallows	...and F*** This Shit I'm So Bored...	...and For Once It Turns Out I Was Wrong and Harry Was Right. Who'd have thought it?!	...and the Ultimate Victo- oh Shit I Didn't See That One Coming...	...and I'm Still Playing Silly Buggers Even Though I'm Dead

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The art of online conversations

These days I spend a lot of my time online. I have made many friends on Facebook and I spend much of my time chatting to my friends and trying to promote my business through networking pages and groups. I conduct entire conversations through typed messages. And I've come to realise that it's very difficult to convey emotion and tone through typed messages alone. There are no facial expressions or tone of voice to guide you as to the writer's feelings.

My writing style has changed a lot over the last couple of years. As a solicitor (which was my former life) my writing was generally very correct, very polite and rather formal. I never used to use emojis, and I was scarce in my use of exclamation marks - one doesn't want to sound over-excited, you know. And I'd never have dreamed of making friends with people I'd only ever met online - they might be weirdos!

I think I'm still a grammar nerd - it irks me when "your" is used instead of "you're," or if there are apostrophes in places there shouldn't be. But some things I've come to accept are necessary when conducting conversations online. A laughing face emoji can transform a staid reply into amusing banter. A series of exclamation marks can convey a sense of uncontainable excitement - or outrage, depending on the context. Using terms of endearment (honey, my lovely, my dear etc) conveys a sense of affection for others that can help to foster relationships with people you have never met and most likely never will meet.

But still, these tools for adding emotion to the typed words are not foolproof. I've seen countless arguments arise because a relatively innocent comment has been misconstrued as an insult, and then an aggressive defensive response has triggered a spat, rapidly deteriorating into childish name calling, with friends of the combatants wading in to support their side, and innocent bystanders trying to no avail to bring calm and reason. 

These types of arguments never end amicably. The issue is never resolved. Normally they just stop when an admin on the relevant page or group steps in to turn off the comments and/or ban all the people whose behaviour they deem to have been unacceptable. Those involved will forever consider the people on the other side as enemies, and if they come across each other again in another forum, an argument is very likely to arise again.

I'm lucky to have never been directly involved in one of these arguments. Though maybe it's due to my non-confrontational nature. On the rare occasion I've had a comment directed my way that sounded rude or insulting, instead of immediately responding to the perceived insult, I've taken a step back and re-read it in a different voice to try to work out how likely it is that the author intended me an insult. And in all cases I've chosen to believe that the comments were well intentioned, and continued the conversation in a friendly manner - and in all cases things have turned out well, thankfully.   

So my thought for the day is that maybe we should all give each other the benefit of the doubt; not jump to conclusions; not assume that others are out to get us. And even if someone does say something mean - ignore it, delete it, don't rise to the bait. Life is too short to get upset about things said by a random person on the internet. They're all weirdos, after all.

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Some day, I'll get round to doing that...

Do you have things that you always mean to do, but never quite get round to? Well, this blog is something that I've been meaning to do for months, but kept putting it off - to start with because I couldn't think what to write, and then, to be honest, I just plain forgot about it!

But it got me thinking about other things that I've meant to do and never have. Like learning Spanish, or how to fix a car; keeping in touch with old friends; volunteering at an old people's home, or winning the lottery.

Some of these are obviously just fantasies, with virtually zero chance of them ever happening; others arise from benevolent intentions but again, are unlikely to actually happen as they're only on my list as a result of a vague feeling that I should be doing "good deeds."

Others are things that could become reality, if I wanted them enough. I could learn how to speak Spanish if I took a class; I could learn how to fix a car if I went on a course. But do I want them enough? I'd love to be able to do these things, but I have little interest in learning to do them. I don't have a lot of spare time and to be honest, I'd rather do something else with it.

But there are other things that I desperately want to do, but fear that I've left it too late. I've never had a huge number of friends, but the ones I have had I like to think they're good friends. Over the years though, I've lost touch with so many. I moved away, they moved away, we all grew up, got married, had children. Life got in the way and it seemed like so much hassle to arrange things. I stopped trying to arrange get togethers in the hope that someone else would instead, but they didn't. And now it's been years and all I see of them is what they choose to share about themselves on Facebook, and I mourn for the friendships I used to have.

But maybe, after all, that's ok. Life moves on, people change. I'm not the same person I was back then, and most likely neither are the friends I used to have. These days I've got new friends, who I do make the effort to see. Not often, as life is busy and between us it can take a month just to find a date that we're all free, but we do meet up when we can. And I've made new friends through Facebook. I spend a lot of my time online these days and I've met people who I've come to consider close friends even if we never (or hardly ever) meet up in person.

I tell myself that it's hard enough keeping up with my current friends, as well as managing my health, work, family, the house, etc etc. There's only so much of me to go around, and I have to prioritise. I think it's broadly true that if you really want to do something, you'll find a way to do it. So maybe the fact that I haven't kept in touch with my old friends means that, deep down, I didn't feel it was worth the effort. 

My biggest fear though is that it might have been worth the effort, but now I've left it too late. Although I have some old friends that I can meet up with after years apart and it's like we saw each other yesterday, there have been other occasions with old friends where it was just an hour of awkwardness, once we'd finished the "do you remember" conversations, and found we had nothing left to say to each other. This may be a natural consequence of us growing older and having become different people as we established new lives for ourselves. Or it might be that if we'd kept in touch more regularly along the way, we wouldn't now be strangers to each other. Who knows?

And I guess, after all, that's the point: who knows? There's no benefit in dwelling on "what ifs". Things might have been better, they might have been worse; they might have been different, or ended up not that different after all. But since we'll never know, it does us no good to dwell on it. All we can do is examine our lives as they are now, and decide what are the things we most want to do next. I might have left it too late to keep my old friendships alive, but there are new things to do: new challenges to face; new friendships to maintain; new obligations to fulfil. 

I don't want to live my life with regrets. So I'll move on from the old regrets, and try to live my life from now on so that I don't create new regrets. Life is, after all, too short.

Jenny x

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