Christmas with Uniquely UK

Celebrate Christmas this year with hand made products that have been designed and created with lots of love and passion.

UUK , ie Uniquely UK bring you an assortment of goodies in wonderful Christmas colours. Just click here for some inspirational ideas for gifts and decorations......and if you like what you see and it doesn't quite fit your colour scheme then just let them know

Life after full time IT work

Its been a long time since my last blog posting and my life has changed so much since then.

My full time work , that I did enjoy so much has come to an end. After a lot of heart wrenching discussions with family and friends I decided to take voluntary redundancy from my full time job in June 2013. My job was with the local council looking after a team of IT developers and support people. I have been in IT since my twenties (over 30 years ! Yipes) and thought I was there to stay well in to my sixties but life is about living ! and its about time I had a change and leave all the new emerging technology to the youngsters.

4 and a half months later and I'm still trying to decide what to do for the rest of my life.

Do I try and find another full time job in IT? My professionally written CV is out there , I have job agencies contact me with jobs they think I'm suitable for and I have applied for a few jobs. Am I bothered that I don't get interviews? I think the longer I'm out of  a job , the more I don't want to go through an interview process and the more I'm scared of the 1st days at work , getting to meet new people , being tested on my IT skills (which will be diminishing as technology changes , month on month). 

 Do I try and make a living out of selling my hand knitted items. Well we all know that's impossible! If you calculate the amount of time it takes me to hand knit an item x even just the minimum wage then I would be pricing my hand knitted items right out of the market. So even though I love knitting and love selling on-line and the on-line community , hand knitting will always stay as a hobby. Saying that, have you seen my new "mug hugs" , little fair isle wool mug cosies using some techniques I picked up at a Rowan workshop. These are adorable , brilliant gift ideas for Christmas presents. I would really like these to take off , I have some really cool ideas for designs for the whole year , for kids and adults alike.

Within the 1st month of being at home , I developed 2 little web sites , one to celebrate TheFeminineTouch , linking to my Etsy shop. Here I try and give potential customers some background information on my designs , what I have been working on recently and how to buy from me. The other one - UniquelyUK, is one that really excites me is one I developed in collaboration with a team of UK artisans from the Etsy community.  here I used my team leader abilities to bring a team from all over the UK virtually together to develop an on-line presence. I am finding that each individual in the team has unique skills to bring to the table. For example, one young lady is brilliant at manipulating photographs into montages to use on the web site and another is a lovely poet and we have used her skills in bringing together an introduction poem (more of that in another blog posting).

So how do I incorporate my knowledge and skills in IT, my team leader abilities and my knowledge of on-line selling and crafting to make a living for myself? Read my next blog postings to follow me in my journey.........

Uniquely UK

You might have heard of us, you might not, but you soon will ..........................

Uniquely UK is a name we deliberated over for a few weeks, it’s something to celebrate our uniqueness and individuality and also letting the world know we are from the UK.  

Who are we? Well let’s start from the beginning. 

We are 10 individual crafters, selling on Etsy, chatting virtually in the forums, loving each other’s work, really getting to know each other. A few months ago, we decided to venture away from Etsy a little. We wanted to set up our own web site, showing off our best work to the world. We had tons of ideas for new products to complement each others; what we wanted the web site to look like; how we wanted the admin side of things to work.  It soon became obvious that it would take a few months to get it off the ground.  

So in the meantime we decided to open a little shop on Folksy where you can see our work alongside others in the collaboration. We are really pleased with the result. Hope you are too.

We have built special “wedding” and “father’s day” sections, our themes as we call them. We are able now to see where the gaps are in our product range and most importantly we have learnt how to virtually work together. This has been no mean feat. It’s difficult enough when a “team” work together in the same office, but imagine having to coordinate everything when we are all scattered across the UK. 

 Introducing the individual crafters in Uniquely UK

RDRphotography ~

~  GracesFavours  ~

~  PursePoppet  ~

 ~ Rebecca's Emporium ~

~  Blucha  ~

~  JaneCrick  ~

~  TataniaRosa  ~

~  AislingDezines  ~

~  damsontreepottery  ~

And myself ~ TheFeminineTouch ~

In  ~ UniquelyUK ~

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to keep an eye on what we're up to and all of the exciting things coming soon to

Uniquely UK