The Lovely Janey Butler

Earlier this year I started to follow the lovely and very talented Janey Butler on twitter. Janey is an amazing wedding and event designer / planner based in the North West. Whilst I have been volunteering at Liverpool Museum I have been working on my Bronze Arts Award. One of the sections I need to complete is writing about someone within my chosen industry who inspires me. As soon as I read the brief, I instantly knew I wanted to write about Janey. She very kindly allowed me to interview her and provided me with some lovely images to go along with it. So again thank you Janey and below is my interview with her.

Sophie - Hi Janey! I would first like to thank you for agreeing to answer some questions for my Bronze Art Award

Janey - You are very welcome darling.

S - First of all could you tell me a little bit about yourself?

J - My name is Janey Butler and I own and run Sweet Days and Roses which is a bespoke wedding planning and design company based in Cheshire.

I was born and grew up in the Cotswolds on a gorgeous farm in a beautiful conservation village in the heart of the Gloucestershire countryside, which for a child was just idyllic. My mother is an amazing gardener and always had beautiful roses everywhere which is where, I am sure, my love of roses and flowers comes from.

My love of art and design also started from as early an age as 6 when I used to annually win art competitions I entered into. My Nana was an amazing artist and I think I have inherited her artistic genes.

As a family, we always used to go over to the south of France in our VW camper van and this is where my love of this gorgeous stylish country came from. I still adore now popping over to France every year to get my supply of vintage linens and buttons and other gorgeous antique french pieces that I use a lot within my work... we are in fact off to Paris in May to do just this.

From here I went to a good school where I excelled in Art and Design and then went onto Cheltenham Art College and then the London College of Fashion off Oxford Street where I studied Theatre Costume design.

I have always loved making things out of gorgeous bits of fabric, especially if it is a little worn and torn...there is something very satisfying making something beautiful for someone to love and treasure out of something that most people would just throw away.... This fills me with a lot of satisfaction.

I now live on a beautiful small holding in North Wales, with my husband Andy and our dog Ruby and cat River. We have plans in at the moment to develop our little cottage into a beautiful home. My husbands work is wonderful and I also help him with his projects on the interior design side of things. His website http://www.llamadevelopments.co.uk/ and our other home Spring Cottage is also on there which we just recently developed from a dark and damp little cottage into a beautiful, light home that it is now.

I adore my garden, and love Roses and especially cottage garden flowers and I tend to use these an awful lot in the weddings that I design and style.

Janeys wonderful office and the HQ for Sweet Days and Roses

S - Where did it all begin for Janey of Sweet Days and Roses.

J - Andy and I got married at the wonderful Babington House in Somerset which is a beautiful Georgian House with its own gorgeous, tiny chapel in the grounds. http://www.babingtonhouse.co.uk/

Our wedding was a beautiful day, and I just loved organising everything for it. In the run up to our wedding I made all of my ladies favours which were out of gorgeous vintage linen, vintage lace, old mother of pearl buttons and pretty faux velvet flowers, pearls and twinkly rhinestones. These were filled with gorgeous smelling lavender and had little personalised pretty cotton name tags on the back with "Andy and Janey. 21st August 2008"

Vintage favours made by Janey

J - I am all about attention to detail. I am a firm believer that it is this that sets beautiful weddings apart and it's the little finishing touches that people see and remember.

After our wedding everyone kept telling me I should set up my very own wedding planning and design company as lots said it was the loveliest wedding they had been to....So I put my thinking cap on and decided to put my hand to it and this is where Sweet Days and Roses was born from.

After our wedding Cosmopolitan Bride Magazine contacted me and said they wanted to feature our beautiful day in their fabulous magazine and they did a 4 page spread on our wedding day. 

Since then I have helped design and plan so many beautiful weddings, a number of which you can see on my lovely website http://www.sweetdaysandroses.co.uk/

Janeys Wedding feature in Cosmopoliton Bride Magazine, I love her dress!

S - Who or what are your inspirations?

J - I adore French architecture & antiques. I love finding gorgeous vintage bits in brocante or junk shops and even if a little worn or broken I love painting them up and fixing them and making them into beautiful objects to use within my weddings or for vintage styling with photographers for magazines , etc.

I especially love the Louis XVI furniture and design. The whole romance and beauty of this time is just so evident in furniture and architecture and even the way people dressed in this period of history ...simply fabulous.

Gorgeous Vintage finds painted and brought back to life by Sweet Days and Roses 

J - I adore flowers, especially roses ....I have a real love of roses, the way they look and smell is just heavenly in my eyes. I just love working with them, especially the beautiful old English Roses, these are the best.

I also love nature, and like to keep all that I design and make as natural and pure as possible.

Some of the lovely flowers from Janeys garden that inspire her.

S - If you could name the most rewarding thing about your job what would it be?

J - Making things beautiful, especially my weddings that I create and seeing the gorgeous bride smile with excitement as to what we are looking to achieve.

I also love meeting other fabulous people within this industry and working with them and their creative talents. I have met some amazingly clever people through my line of work, and continue to do so on a regular daily basis.

Vintage styling by Janey

S - Is there anything you dislike about your job?

J - No nothing at all......I love it all !! x

S - What has been your proudest moment as a designer?

J - My work is often featured in fabulous glossy magazines and this always makes me feel very proud. I have been featured in Brides Magazine, Cosmopolitan Bride as well as Country Living Magazine with my favours and gifts.

I think though for me the proudest moments are just seeing how a wedding I have been working on for months and months all comes together on the big day and to see the brides and grooms elated faces at how beautiful everything looks....That always makes me feel very proud and very very happy.

S - If you could offer one piece of advice for someone wanting to make it like you what would it be?

J - Enjoy what you are doing right at this moment. Do well in your studies but always remember that you have a lot of life and time ahead of you and to not get too bogged with worry about things.

Enjoy this time of your life and focus on the studies you really love. This will stand you in good stead for the future.

Always be courteous and kind to others as you never know who you may well bump into or need in the future. (You are always lovely and courteous honey so no worries there !)

Love life and follow your passions.

S - Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions. I really appreciate your time and can't wait to work with you in May.

J - Me too darling xxx

Thanks for taking the time to read my blogpost and thank you to Janey for providing the wonderful photos and answering my questions.

As I am using this interview for my Bronze Art Award, I would really appreiceioate it if you could post your own comments about who inspires you and why? The more comments the better as it will all help towards my Bronze Art Award.

Knowsley Vinvolved Awards 2011

Last week, Me, Cousi, Carole and Anna were invited to attend the Knowlsey Vinvolved Awards 2011. There was a superhero theme on the night and we where invited to attend in fancy dress or formal wear. I went for formal wear. Although some volunteers did attend in fancy dress, there was even a giant kangaroo (i think) and scooby doo. I had been told in advance by Carole who I volunteer with that I had won an award, she very kindly nominated me, but I was unsure as to how I would recieve it and what it would be. Anna, Cousi and Me were also going to recieve a certificate to recognise the hours we have given whilst volunteering.

Cousi and Me being escorted down the red carpet on arrival by a Superhero!

The night was presented by a group of young volunteers, in fancy dress of course and they did a wonderful job. It was really nice to know even the running of the event had volunteers involved. As an active volunteer within Knowlsey and Liverpool it was great to get to meet other young volunteers and here about all the other projects going on.

Since June 2010, I have been volunteering within Halewood Arts Association and National Museums Liverpool. I think I am on 400+ hours at the moment. Volunteering is something I love doing and I especially like giving something back to the community I have grew up in and to gain recognition for the work I have done at Halewood Arts Association was lovely.

Anna, Cousi and Me recieving our certificates from Jackie Davies, Chief Executive of Knowsley CVS

Awards were presented by Colin McKeown, TV/Film Maker and Producer of Independent Production Company LA Production and Jackie Davies (pictured above). The award ceremony was decorated very nicely, with each table themed under a different superhero. We were on 'The Incredibles' table and as an 'Event Designer' I spent a lot of my time looking at the table decorations and event styling. Which I really liked, huge cocktail glasses filled with different coloured lighting where on each table and there where cute bat decorations around. 

There was a caricaturist at the night too, giving free portraits to all attending and we were entertained by the brilliant Kirkby based dance group Performance Studios, local band Major Major and singer Jay Norton (who was really good!)

Carole, Project Manager of Halewood Arts getting a free Caricature 

The night was brilliant and it was lovely to receive an award. I was not expecting to get a real award at all and I also got £30 worth of vouchers which was lovely. Overall there was 9 of us who won Youth Volunteer of the Year and after hearing why we all received an award, every one was really deserved.

Cousi, Carole, Me. Halewood Arts Association.

7 of the 9 Youth Volunteers of the Year 2011

My lovely award

I am very grateful for my award and would like to thank Carole a lot for not only nominating me, but also giving me the opportunity to volunteer within Halewood Arts Association. I have learnt so much there and recieving some recognition for the work I have done there has been wonderful.

If this is the first time you have read my blog, feel free to browse my portfolio on my website.

Thank you to KCVS  for the photographs. You can read the official press release from KCVS for the awards here.

Always Forgetting

I am always blogging and then ten minutes from posting realise I have forgotton something. Every time it happens! This week I forgot to blog about being featured on The Young Creatives blog. It is a fairly new project, but it is a really great way of discovering new, up and coming under 25s within the creative industry. My hits on my website and followers on twitter have gone up since being on there and I would definitely recommend browsing through the website to see if any of the other 'young creatives' stand out to you. Some great work is being feautured on there. You can read my interview here. If you use twitter you can follow The Young Creatives here @t_yc.

I am still working in the Museum at the moment, just coming towards the end of the project I have been working on and looking forward to starting the next. I am going to write a full blog post about the exhibition I have been working on when I finish. I printed out my final plans today and there is a meeting tomorrow to discuss them. So as you can imagine I am pretty nervous! This suddenly feels a lot scarier than having tutorials with Paul in Uni!

Just a few examples of what I have been doing at the museum

Now on a different yet extremely exciting note, I am very happy to announce that in May I am going to be reunited with the wonderful Kate of @gowercottage. Kate asked me to work alongside her at the Real Food Festival at Earls Court in May and of course I said yes, not only because I will get to eat some of her amazing Gower Cottage Brownies, but I get to wear one of the much wanted BITE ME t shirts! I can tell already its going to be so much fun and I literally cannot wait for our reunion. Fingers crossed it can beat PIEGATE 2010. How many days is it till May?!

Piegate 2010 <3

Finally...

I am now 100% officially, Sophie Bold, BA Hons Theatre, Performance and Event Design (first class)

January Update

It's coming to the end of January now and as I have had a little spare time, I thought I would use today to update all the things I have been meaning to update for a while. My blog being one of them. If you follow me on twitter, or read my blog at all, then you will know at the beginning of January I started a four week internship at National Museums Liverpool in the design department. I have been enjoying it so much and learning such a lot about Auto CAD and the work that goes into designing an exhibition. 

At the moment I have been lucky enough to work on the Living Apart by Ian Berry exhibition. As it is a photography exhibition I have been trying to work out the layout of the moveable walls and the photographs. Its been a great starting project as it has allowed me to get really stuck into learning AutoCAD. Luckily I know the exhibition space pretty well, as it is the space the museum kindly allowed me to use as the location for my final major project at University. It is great to be able to learn how a real exhibition comes together and see how the designers work alongside a large number of other departments and people to make an exhibition come together. After a meeting this week, where I shown the plans I had come up with (very nerve-racking) I was asked if I would like to extend my internship until the beginning of March. I am so happy to be able to stay longer as I feel I am learning so much another four weeks would be brilliant.

Things are definitely looking up for me at the moment, I have been getting really stuck into Halewood Arts Association and I am currently in the process of planning and organising a really exciting project for the Junior Artists Club. It will run over a few weeks and involve the local community and Halewood Park. Fingers crossed the children enjoy it, I will blog more about it when the details become more finalised. Me and Carole are also in the process of applying for lots of funding, so if you are reading and would like to give Halewood Arts Association some money, feel free.

There is a lot to look forward too over the next couple of weeks. I will be graduating (finally) on the 8th February and can't wait, even if I am very nervous about standing up on stage.

I have finished updating my website too and feel happy with how it looks now. If you would like to have a look through that would be great and feel free to give me any feedback... but please be nice.

Museums, Events and Meetings

It has only just occurred to me that I haven’t blogged in 2011. I have been pretty busy lately and keep saying to myself, I will blog tonight and then completely forgetting. So here it is!

I have been up to quite a bit in the first 12 days of the year. Firstly I have been back at Halewood Arts Association. Me and Carole have been trying to work out the years events and what we would like to do within Halewood Arts. One of the first things we are thinking about is getting Halewood Arts online. I have been put in charge of the twitter account. Ever since the Good Food Show in Birmingham, I have become completely addicted to twitter. Not only are all the people on their lovely, supportive and always on hand with advice, it is a really great way of networking and meeting people with similar interests and careers. It seemed the obvious thing to do to get Halewood Arts Association on there. If you are on twitter it would be great if you could follow us. I am trying to get our followers up at the moment.

@halewoodarts

Carole has asked me to take lead with some of the childrens art workshops too, which is great. I am just trying to come up with some exciting things they can do. A lot of the children have been attending for a number of years and it can be hard to think of new things for them to do each week.

I am also having a large input in the events going on with Halewood Arts Association this year and assisting Carole with applying for funding and thinking of interesting things we can do within the community and with the children. I shall keep you posted on anything we come up with.

On Monday I started my internship / work experience within the Liverpool Museum Design department. I have only been there two days but I am loving it already. The design team mostly work with Auto CAD, a program I haven’t used before. Simon, one of the lead 3D designers talked through the program with me for about an hour and I seem to have picked up the basics now. On my first day I recreated some plans they have and managed to get them as close as I could. I am working on a real project now, working on wall plans and photo layout. I am really enjoying it and look forward to the next four weeks. If I come away from this with a new skill of being able to use Auto CAD it will be brilliant.

I also had a great meeting with Rich Pontefract from Another Media based in Liverpool. I got in touch with him to ask for some advice about getting ahead in the Event Management industry and he kindly offered to meet with me to discuss it in person. It was one of the most informative hours I’ve ever had. He gave me pages and pages of advice and also explained to me how he set up his business and what he has done since University. It was extremely helpful and it was nice to have someone reassure me that everything I am doing at the moment is good. Sometimes you need someone who isn’t a parent or friend to tell you that you are doing well. I came away from the meeting very positive and look forward to meeting Rich again in the future.

This weekend I am hoping to go to the Liverpool Wedding Show with my cousin who is due to marry in 2012, should be a great way of meeting people within the event industry also.

2010... Its been a pleasure, but bring on 2011

As so many people seem to be doing the same and to also make myself realise how busy this year has been I am going to blog about 2010. The more I think about it the more I realise just how busy this last year has been and I feel very proud about everything I have achieved.

January feels like a million years away and I'm glad I have my blog archive to help remind me what actually happened. It was January that I began my Major Personal Project for my Theatre, Performance and Event design degree. It is so interesting to look back on my old blog posts and see how my original idea didn’t change as much as I thought it would. My aim was to create an exhibition that shown another side to Liverpool, my home town and that is what I achieved.

February – April consisted of planning and organising my 21^st and lots and lots and lots and lots of research and designing for my Major Personal Project.

I was also lucky enough to be involved in the St Marys Hospice Charity Window Dressing Event in Birmingham. With my team coming in second place. This is where my passion for volunteering came about and I really enjoyed it. Click here for more info about this event.

I also had work experience within World Liverpool Museum which was a great experience. They even let me design and paint a mural on a wall within one of the temporary exhibitions. To see more of this click here. It was also in April that I really started to become confident in Sketchup and my love hate relationship with the programme began.

May had to be one of the hardest, most stressful, yet rewarding months of my life. It was this month that I was in University from 7 in the morning, until we got kicked out and working until 3/4/5 in the morning every single day. My life revolved around making scale bricks, pavements, white cards models and praying my huge sketchup model wouldn’t crash.

It was June that I could finally say I HAVE A DEGREE. It was the most amazing feeling in the world handing all of my work in and seeing it all displayed in our amazing degree show. One of the amazing things about being on a course with only 15 other people is 1, how unbelievably close you all become and 2, how quickly you get your results. Within 2 weeks of handing in my work and also being chosen to be marked by the external examiner, I got given my results. I will never forget the moment Paul told me I got a first. University was the best experience I have ever gone through and when I look back at how hard I worked, I feel so proud at my results and don’t regret anything from University.

My exhibition shows the journey an emigrant would go on during the 19th Century and the problems they would face along the way. As I also enjoy theatre design, I wanted to combine a sense of theatre within my exhibition and wanted the exhibition to become an experience. Allowing the visitor to feel as if they had stepped back in time and actually become an 19th Century emigrant. I chose to do this by creating a fully dressed space using actors in each area to interact with the visitors and make the whole concept feel real. To see my final major project click here.

July – Present ;

Since leaving University I have been lucky enough to get involved in a lot. Volunteering is something I am passionate about and I have been able to get stuck into a lot of this. Since June I have been Volunteer Event and Exhibition Co-Ordinator for Halewood Arts Association. This has been an excellent opportunity for me and I have learnt so much from Carole who runs all of HAA. I assist with the organising of trips, events and exhibitions, aswell as assist in the weekly Junior Artists Club art classes. This is with a group of 7-12 year olds who all love art and it is so rewarding volunteering there. They even let me design the Christmas Grotto for the children, which is something I enjoyed so much! Carole has introduced me to so many lovely artists and volunteers and I cannot wait to get more involved in the next year. To see more of what I have done with HAA look at the Big Draw and Grotto tab to the left of my website. Or browse through my blog.

2010 has reconfirmed my love for working within the Event and Exhibition industry and after spending a week working at The BBC Good Food Show, Borough Market and the Real Food Festival, I have been lucky enough to combine work with my passion for food and cooking. This also allowed me to meet some lovely producers and people who now have the pleasure of putting up with me on twitter :)

I am really looking forward to what 2011 brings. I am to start a design internship in Liverpool Museum on the 10^th January which I can’t wait for and thanks to twitter have even managed to get some work on a huge wedding in May, assisting with an amazing wedding design company 'Sweet days and Roses' on making the wedding look beautiful.

If you are still reading thank you, I seem to have written more than I originally planned, but I forgot how much I have done. Hopefully 2011 will be a million times more busy and this time next year I hope to be writing about living in London, with a great job doing what I love.

I know everyone says it but 2011 is really going to be my year!