How time flies! We’ve been in our new home for about a month and already it feels like home.

Thank you so much for your very kind messages and cards. Some of you asked to see pictures of our workshop once we’ve settled in, so here we are with a glimpse into our new space at 4B Walronds Park (TA3 6QP). Prettier pictures will follow in due course, but for now we’re concentrating on finding the right places for everything and catching up with the time that we inevitably lost during the move.

The picture below shows the scene when we started moving in. I still recall the feeling of dread as I saw our canvases and wool and realised that I’d be the one putting it all away. What a task!

Then again, look at all that wonderful SPACE, something we hadn’t experienced in our old workshop since 2016.

It was time to knuckle down, and our Anchor tapestry wool was soon on the shelves.

Double space has given us double the number of packing areas. Janine can now pack cushions and other tapestries in the sewing den, while we send out kits and tapestry frames in the post area.

Our beloved canvas stretching table (an old door) has done us proud over many years and is now in its third Jolly Red workshop. It now has its own rug, and we can actually walk around the whole table. Before the move one side was against a wall. This way suits us much better!

The keen-eyed among you will have spotted the double sink in the background – oh joy, such luxury – two sinks for us to use to dampen the towels that we use when stretching tapestry canvases…and we have a lot of lockdown canvases to stretch!

The office manager has made several visits to check on progress with the move and even tested out the nice cool floor – perfect for the hot weather we enjoyed for most of July.

Our new workshop is on a busy industrial park, so we needed new signs to help couriers to find us. Donna at For Every Cloud did a fantastic job for us and made three signs including the one below, seen here resting before Calum and mrjollyred fixed it to the side of our building.

This is the sign that couriers and visitors should spot as they drive into Walronds Park (we’re in the far end of the first building on the left). Just in case anyone misses that one, we have another 8ft sign above our main entrance.

If anyone manages to miss both of these 8ft wide signs, we hope they’ll give us a call for directions. We’ll then nip out, find them and take away their keys as they really shouldn’t be on the roads with such poor eyesight!!

Blue skies as Calum and mrjollyred put our new signs up.

Sign going up

Our third sign is a smaller one outside our office, with a gentle reminder to call or email us to let us know if you’d like to visit.

Since March and the beginning of lockdown, we have been busier than ever both with our tapestry kits and our making up service.

We have had some visitors and have devised a way of helping them to decide on fabric colours for their tapestries without having to venture too far into the workshop itself. We have a huge table in front of our roller door and can bring fabric boxes out to the front. So far, so good and it’s worked well.

A little plea Looking ahead to the autumn, we start to think about our October Christmas deadline for making up tapestries.

For many reasons 2020 has been a year like no other and we are already making up the same number of tapestries that we would normally expect to be making in October. We have no way of knowing how many canvases will be coming our way from September when the autumn rush normally starts, so if you have finished a tapestry please do send it in sooner rather than later. It’ll help us to ensure that we send your tapestry back to you in good time for Christmas.

That’s it for now. We’ll have a newsletter going out in the first half of August, so do remember to sign up if you haven’t already done so.

All best wishes,

Kelly and the Jolly Red ladies x