What with being the child rearing end of the Electric Angel empire I don’t tend to get out much. So when Adrian suggested conning someone into babysitting and coming down to the Merchant for the Creative Coast Swap Shop I jumped at the chance.

The creative skills on offer to swap were varied to say the least from photography through drum lessons and cake decorating to corset modeling. Fortunately for me there were a few visual artists there who were happy to swap a piece of work for a website and I managed to make a deal with Rachel Welford who works with glass.

Rachel makes stained glass and fused glass pieces, you may have seen her installation at Scarborough Hospital. I have been a big fan of hers for a while now particularly the architectural stuff as I like things to be both beautiful and useful, and this is a great opportunity to get a nice something or other. The image above is from a fused glass piece called Barnacles.

We also met John Allsopp at the event who was offering web site testing in return for being able to use the site as a case study. We saw this as a win win situation and since John is such a big fan of our new blog we thought we would go for it. Check out John’s blog at johnallsopp.co.uk.

In fact the swap shop went so well it inspired Rachel to organise a babysitting swap club so I may even be able to get out attend another Creative Coast event, you never know.