A Day in the Life of Koolbadges

Its been a busy week on & off the badges – we helped my brother set up for a Halloween party at his house, but escaped home before 20 3 year olds rocked up & created havoc. We are also flat hunting so if anyone knows of a good sized 2 bed unfurnished flat to rent in Manchester we need one.

I will leave you with some badges that we have made this past week.

My 3 year old niece is dressing up as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Its her favourite film. So cute.

I love anything by Belle and Boo they have a great Halloween selection in their shop

How crazy good are these pumpkins?!

How to make a White Pumpkins. These are pretty

This lady has some amazing ideas & Halloween How To guides for great treats

Fun Zombie Halloween Poster from Lovely MPLS Etsy Shop

Hope you all have a Happy Halloween …..

After a long hard think and many hours of stressing John out fixing my tired old dell laptop, I decided to upgrade to an Apple MacBook Pro. John already uses an iMac and since switching to only using Macs a few years ago has found the reliability to be wonderful. Before buying the iMac in October 2009 we both used windows desktops. Since then both desktops died, were repaired, died and so fourth.

This is stressful when you depend on your computer for your business. So after a long save & selling the dell laptop to put towards the?Ǭ†cost we bought a new MacBook Pro. It took a while to transfer all my files over to it (in badge PSD’s & PDF’s alone I have over 10,000 files). I’m slowly getting used to all the changes & I’m loving being able to blog & work on the go. The battery lasts between 7 and 9 hours so far so I don’t need to carry my power cord. It’s also very strong & slips into a neoprene sleeve for carrying about in a backpack.

I Love it 🙂 Although John is now jealous as mine has a newer processor & 4 cores, not to mention a lot of ram.

Our first full day in Amsterdam was spent wandering around the canals & side streets.

We walked to Anne Frank’s House (huis). The queue was around 40 minutes but it was worth the wait, and whilst not the happiest sight to see, it was really moving & educational at the same time. I read The Diary a long time ago, but after visiting the house decided to buy it again on the my kindle.

We also found a great Coffee Shop called The Coffee Company. Amsterdam really doesn’t do Starbucks (which is a good thing) and the coffee & atmosphere was great. Good coffee & tea selection, great cakes & you can even have Muesli (as we did) at any time of the day. Also free wifi meant we could checkin on orders & deal with all your queries. Got to love a bit of free wifi!

We also stumbled upon the floating flower market (Bloemenmarket). It is amazing, full of colour. Lots of bulbs & tulips and random items. Well worth a visit if you are over that way.

We also went to visit De Oude Kerk (the old church) in the medieval part of the city. This was a pretty impressive building but more impressive where the Prostitutes. Bearing in mind that we visited this area at 10am the local ladies where already hard at work & standing in their windows. It’s surprising how much of a tourist attraction the red light district is, but it was pretty funny & we had fun just wondering about.

One thing we where not prepared for was the amount of cyclists. Amsterdam is a mental city when it comes to the bike. Bike is king in the city and after seeing just how lethal the cyclists where, we chickened out of renting some. Perhaps next time 🙂

Later in the day we stopped for Dinner at a small italian restaurant. We had bolognese & Tuna Salad & a well earned beer. Amsterdam is a great place for food and you are not limited on places to eat.

That night we went back to the Red Light district, lit up in all it’s glory. There was a great mix of people from parties of men & women, to pensioners on walking tours & local parents out walking with their kids. At first it felt a bit weird, but it quirky became normal. Well worth a visit at night. At this point we already felt like locals & we had been in Amsterdam for less than 48 Hours. After a long walk around the old part of the City (Die Wallen) we headed back on the GVB to the hotel. We must have walked around 25 miles this day, and we where ready ?Ǭ†for bed & some more cake :o)

I am an avid reader of blogs & have quite a few that i check daily before getting down & making badges. I thought i would share with you my top 10. I would love for you to share your top blogs with me. I am always looking for blogs so i can distract myself form what i am meant to be doing :o)

1. Honey bee in the city,?Ǭ†This lady is super stylish & i do not know how she fits in all her ventures. There just are not enough hours in the day.

2. Sometimes Sweet – Now this lady is a mumma, book lover and a great writer. I simply love reading her blog. She is always inspiring me to get my butt in gear & exercise.

3. The Black Apple – This is one talented lady. I own 3 of her prints & hope to purchase some of her lockets as Christmas presents this year. Her blog is whimsical and feels like tales from a forgotten era.

4. The Reject Rant – The writings of Emma Barratt, she is a talented illustrator & owner of the cutest vintage Mini. She lives in London and writes about work, life and snowboarding

5. Chez Larson – makes me want to organise everything. Her home is an inspiration.

6. LA- From Freckled Nest – Her blog is crafting HEAVEN.

7. Halfgirl – is the blog of Young a lady who takes amazing photographs

8. Bleubird – Another lady with great vintage style & a lovely family too.

9. Bonbi Forest – Treasures dreamt up by a sweet lady living in a coastal Cornish village

10. Pretty Zoo – Lovely blog written by a lady who moved from New Zealand to Germany & then to London. She also make lovely jewellery.

I hope you will stop by them all & have a read. I hope Wednesday is shaping up great for you all. x

We find The last 3 months of the year to be very busy. Halloween orders grow year on year & we seem to have a lot of people that are purchasing their Christmas badges early this year too, so the studio is a little chaotic to say the least. We have been making a lot of badges for Office Halloween Parties and for people giving them out instead of sweets to Trick or Treaters.

We want to thank all our customers for choosing to buy their badges from us. We are UK based and make all our badges by hand. We take a lot of pride in our customer service and make each badge with LOVE :o)

Here are some of the orders we have sent out this month. Can you spot yours?

We are back from Amsterdam. It was a great trip which started with a bad morning. Firstly leaving the house at 3AM is hard enough, but being met with a huge Scottish storm on the drive to the airport, and faulty petrol pumps whilst trying to fill up in said storm at 3AM is less than ideal.

Once at the airport we parked up, cleared security super quick in Edinburgh and had a nice breakfast as the sun came up over the airfield. The flight was perfect & our first view of Amsterdam was the amazing Schipol airport. We where helped by a friendly train guard to buy tickets and find our train into the city, and this set the tone for the entire trip. Everyone in Amsterdam is friendly & they all speak better english than most Natives of the UK.

We got into Amsterdam Central station and bought the?Ǭ†OV-chipkaart. Don’t fall for the expensive tourist cards, buy one of these?Ǭ†OV-chipkaart and use the public transport like a local. The card is?Ǭ†?Ǭ†?¢‚Äö¬¨ 7,50 to buy, and you can top it up with anything over?Ǭ†?Ǭ†?¢‚Äö¬¨ 5,00. The card then means you can swipe it when you get on or off a tram or bus without needing to pay for the trip with cash & most tram journeys cost around 1 euro.

The day we arrived was so wet & rainy that we had to fight our way around the city with the Umbrella. We managed to see loads, found a few cute places to eat & drink but headed home early after being awake for around 18 hours. The hotel was great (Amsterdam Eden Manor Hotel) and whilst not in a city centre location, I would much rather stay a few tramstops away from the tourist areas and mingle with the locals. You get a much better feel for a city staying where the locals stay, away from the usual tourist traps.