I love the first Saturday of the month!

My mother-in-law is a very talented lady. Put simply, she makes soap - but what she does is so much more than that! Not only does she make natural olive oil soap from scratch (as opposed to melt & pour etc) but she also makes a range of face & body products that smell divine. And once I a month I get to immerse myself in her beautifully scented world when we pack up the car and head to the local village market day. You can find Wildthyme Natural Soap on their website, facebook and etsy.

Yesterday was one of these days, and I must confess I spend the whole month looking forward it! The weather forecast predicted showers throughout the day, but we were lucky that the first "real" rain that we experienced was at about 1:30pm (which admittedly put a premature end to the day, but only by about an hour).

My new holly fabric

One of the things that I love about going to the markets is seeing all the other things that people have made. The girl who has the stall next to us makes sock monkeys. They're super cute, but they're designed more for decoration than vigorous play so I don't think they'd suit Blossom & Bean! Not to mention that while I think they're gorgeous, they don't look hard to make, so I probably wouldn't buy something that I could make myself (if they were up to being played with in the vigorous fashion that Blossom & Bean employ!). BUT, she also had some gorgeous holly print fat quarters for sale and I have a small holly obsession so I bought the fat quarters as well as a couple of larger pieces of holly fabric she had with her. Guess who will be finally getting around to making their quilted Christmas table runner this year? Oh yeah! (I've only had the pattern since Blossom was about 2 months old!)

Another girl near us prints onto her own fabric that she then turns into rings, necklaces, earrings, bookmarks, notebook covers and so much more. I didn't realise that she actually printed the designs on to the fabric herself until I went to buy my MIL a necklace that she'd been eyeing off (and wouldn't buy for herself) and got talking to the girl about her beautiful designs.

Table runner pattern

And yesterday afternoon I discovered another hidden gem. While walking to the carpark  to collect the car so that we could pack it I got distracted by a stall selling painted signs and doorstops and key hooks etc. Normally while I think these look pretty I wouldn't stop, but yesterday she had these really lovely recipe book covers. It was a set of wooden panels that had plastic pages in between so that you could just slip in your own recipes, and she'd painted them with these cute chickens and roosters. I'm not a super chicken-y person, and if there had been one with flowers or something on it I probably would have bought one.. I might ask her next month if she would paint me a non-chicken one!