Today we have enabled comments to our blog!

It has taken a while to figure out how to do it but here we go!

At the end of every post you can leave us a message.

We are moderating comments so please bear with us if your voice isn’t instantly heard.

We will only edit your comment if it’s rude or irrelevant.

We really do welcome your thoughts and ideas.

Kelly x

We made ourselves comfortable with vintage cloth, piles of books, orchids, fairy lights and the promise of a stiff drink at the end of the day.  We made pear and chocolate cake and endless cups of frothed coffee. We made collars, scarves, cuffs, crocheted flowers, cowls and buttons. We made each other laugh.

We made it happen. All of us.

Thank you all for coming to make believe with us.

Lou x

So have your bought your ticket yet?

Here at Make Believe Cafe we are getting very excited!

On 10/10/10 we will be launching our first ever making event.

Pimp Your Wardrobe takes place Cafe Des Artistes, Lewes , East Sussex.

Each morning/afternoon session includes of expert tuition in embroidery, crochet, sewing and knitting.

Ticket price includes tuition and all the materials you need to tart up your wardrobe. Bring your tired cotton skirt/ cotton shirt/ trousers/jeans /hat/coat and together we will transform them into wonderful creations. Winter woollies welcome but please no t-shirts.

Don’t be fearful everyone can create. No previous experience necessary - all abilities catered for.

Queries 07811 765 354 or 07974 123 053

Tickets available on the door or in advance from Si’s Sounds, Station Street, Lewes, East Sussex.

See you there!

Kelly

Read more about us…

This afternoon I sat on a high stool by the window in the Small Batch Coffee Company savouring a latte, the smell of freshly roasted and ground coffee and the people who flowed in to chat, pick up a bag of beans or reward themselves when they stepped off the train.

They are a boutique coffee roasting company based in Hove, East Sussex committed to roasting coffee in small batches; experts in this part of the long journey a coffee cherry makes from tree to cup.

(These first two photographs are taken from their brochure)

All the green beans that they buy are ethically sourced.

Sat on a pile of full coffee sacs, you can watch the roasting through an open door way.

It’s alchemy.

I go back on Friday to pick up the small batch that will be freshly roasted for us.

What a pleasure.

Lou

Emma and I have been talking over our Mother Pukka tea about how good it is to raise your head above the parapet. Since we began Make Believe-ing it is as if people can suddenly see us clearly.  Unlike the Emperor, we are fully clothed - in our pimped wardrobe, enthusiasm and hope.  All three of us have felt our small, sometimes unnerving, step has been worth it and welcomed by our local community and beyond. To community and beyond!

So when I literally bumped into a friend last week and she invited me to see her new shop on Market Street, in Lewes, I was struck by how daring you must be to make a dream a reality.  Nicola has filled her shop, Fleur de The, with strong femininity - armfuls of bold, structural flowers, elegant white washed chairs and vintage tea cups each holding a single bloom in a cradle of foliage.  She has stacked her shelves with Teapigs teas and china cake stands and quietly arranged her trust that people might share her love of fresh flowers and fine tea.

We’ve invited her to come and share some of her style at Pimp Your Wardrobe on Sunday.

Lou

I never know what date it is but I do know when it’s Friday.  Every week I go to Lewes Farmer’s Market to buy bread, apple juice, carrots, falafel, humous and cake from the stall holders.  It is the way to shop.  Today I felt blue and hungry when I arrived.  When I came home to empty my basket and prepare lunch, I felt wealthy and well fed. 

Sarah from Pleasant Bakery is going to come on the 10th with cake for us all.  

Lou

I have fallen in love with textile specialist Margaret Callagan and her Kemptown shop. Emma and I went visiting today to rifle through hat boxes full of embroidered napkins and buttons, rails aching with vintage clothes and floor to ceiling shelves stacked with beautiful linens and scraps of fabric.  We could have bought a whole new wardrobe to pimp.  It is like being invited in to a Tim Walker set. Perfect.  We’re going back on Saturday with more time in our pockets and money on our hands.

(Margaret Callagan Textiles. 30A Upper St. James’s St. Kemptown. Brighton.)

You’ll have to fight us for her and her stock.

Lou

I am going to teach embroidery at Pimp Your Wardrobe so I thought I’d write a little bit about my experience of it. I have grown up surrounded by embroidery. When I was a child my mother sent off for an embroidery kit of massive proportions from Good House Keeping magazine. It was a bedspread with squares arranged in a grid resembling a vegetable garden. Each square containing rows of different veg. Caulies in one, spuds in another. I don’t remember her ever embroidering anything before. Or sadly since. My father inspected her first attempts at a tomato and promptly took control. The result was spectacular. Snails crawled from behind crisp lettuces, butterflies alighted on courgette flowers and goldfish darted around the ornamental pond, a fountain playing prettily in it’s centre.

That was it. He was off. This was the 70’s. The next thing we knew we journeyed  to London and were taken to one of the big department stores. We queued to have our photo taken by a machine that printed out the results using the symbols of the typewriter keyboard to represent the different tones of our faces. My father then painstakingly translated this into embroidery charts and lovingly embroidered a portrait of each of us. I have the one of my mother and here it is.

This happened decades before the amazing software we have today which allows you to scan in any photo or picture you like and at the press of a button an embroidery chart slides out of your printer. Ever since then he has continued to embroider and spends hours, days and weeks embroidering pictures using minute stitches with hands that have spent decades on building sites laying concrete and tiling roofs.

Emma

So have your bought your ticket yet?

Here at Make Believe Cafe we are getting very excited!

On 10/10/10 we will be launching our first ever making event.

Pimp Your Wardrobe takes place Cafe Des Artistes, Lewes , East Sussex.

Each morning/afternoon session includes of expert tuition in embroidery, crochet, sewing and knitting.

Ticket price includes tuition and all the materials you need to tart up your wardrobe. Bring your tired cotton skirt/ cotton shirt/ trousers/jeans /hat/coat and together we will transform them into wonderful creations. Winter woollies welcome but please no t-shirts.

Don’t be fearful everyone can create. No previous experience necessary - all abilities catered for.

Queries 07811 765 354 or 07974 123 053

Tickets available on the door or in advance from Si’s Sounds, Station Street, Lewes, East Sussex.

See you there!

Kelly

Read more about us…

Cafe Des Artistes is verging on deeply cool.  Art hole meets Ikea.  Huge windows, flea market chairs, a still life on the pool table, dinning pods, low floor cushions, photos clipped to a washing line, and formica tables cluttered with colour pencils, candles, satsumas and the kind of oil paintings our grandmothers would have bought at a charity lunch and wrapped in tissue paper.  

We went for lunch today to see how many tables we could commandeer and how much salmon and chocolate cake we could eat. It was lovely.

Lou 

Sometimes I love Ebay. Today I love it. We have been frantically bidding on tablecloths for our first gathering. I’ll be glad when we’ve got enough, my nerves are shot to pieces. I never knew that tablecloth buyers could be so sneaky, devious and sharp. I imagine loads of grannies placing their bids in the last ten seconds, cackling at my lack of expertise and dragging on their cigarettes while I sob over my keyboard. Damn them. I have found that they often nap in the afternoons and I am left in peace to make a purchase or two. Today it all paid off. Three packages arrived. I was so surprised and delighted when I opened them. It was as if the sellers had known the pain I had gone through to get these cloths. My bedroom was filled with the scent of lavender and other people’s washing powder. Rather intimate. The care that these people had put into wrapping my prizes was touching. Tissue, satin ribbons and lavender. Thank you ladies.

Emma

I have been rummaging through the latest magazines to find interesting bits and pieces to put on clothes, bags or in you hair. I’m going to stick them all on a board for inspiration at Pimp Your Wardrobe. I spent a very pleasant afternoon with Diana who is going to be our sewing teacher at ‘the do’. We experimented making felt bows and flowers which we’ll turn into brooches and hair bands. Pity I can’t make sunglasses.

Emma

It was Emma.  Who sewed, well, embroidered, the tiny coffee pot for our shiny good-girl-at-Make-Believe badges.  We plan to leave them lying around town.

The beginning.

The middle.

More middle.

THE END.

Lou

Make Believe Cafe is powered by three women and one great idea.

How could we possibly fail?

Emma is a creative genius. Never more happy than when she is making something. Emma is the talent behind our logo, posters and so much more. 

Lou is a tribal dance teacher and writer.  A creative spark who juggles family life and work. Lou somehow fits in lots of making and seems to know everyone worth knowing. 

Kelly is nudging 40. A mother, a journalist and a thinker by trade, Make Believe Cafe is Kelly’s Mr Ben escape hatch. It provides a break from real life - a chance to play around with creative folk and bake cakes.

What more of an incentive could you want to be involved??