An interview with Matt Stevens

March 27th, 2010

Have you been captivated by the wonderful music we’ve used on our WowThankYou videos? Our prelaunch ‘Taster’ video that featured a track called ‘Dolls House’, and our first Wow… How? to the tune of ‘Moon Dial’ – these inspired pieces of music were written and recorded by Matt Stevens, and are tracks from his debut album, Echo.

Matt lives in North London, and we caught up with him recently to ask him a few questions about his music, and about himself … he is WowThankYou’s ‘resident composer’, and we want to tell you all about him!


What musicians inspire you?

Loads of stuff really – 70’s Kids TV, Metal Stuff, Nick Drake, King Crimson, The Beatles, Napalm Death, The Carpenters, Radiohead, The Smiths, Bad Brains, Squarepusher. It’s very odd but it seems to work.


What inspires your music?

All of the above and the things I see around me – it’s kind of an instrumental soundtrack of our life as it were a film!


Your music style is referred to as looping. What is this?

It’s the process of recording small musical sequences live then playing over the top of them. If you see me live it’s a bit like watching someone make a record piece by piece in front of you. It’s also the only way I could do this music as it would be tough to hire 16 guitarists!


When did you start playing the guitar?

When I was 14ish – I wanted, like all the other kids of my age, to be in Guns And Roses. I was rubbish when I started but I wanted it so much I used to practice night and day until I got it. I supposed I was a bit obsessed!

What has been your best gig so far?

Spratton folk festival was amazing last year – very cool playing on a big stage. I’m opening for the Levellers this year at the May Fest so that should be cool and nerve racking in equal measures.


We hear you are a Beatles fan – what’s your favourite Beatles song, and why?

I’m a huge fan. Love the Beatles – I really like the whole second side of Abbey Road and She’s So Heavy as well. She’s Leaving Home off Sgt Pepper makes me cry and I love Revolver and all the post mid 60’s stuff. Really everything they did changed the music industry from one album to the next.


Tell us more about your album; where did the name Echo come from?

Well it’s from it all being done with guitar loops so Echo seemed to fit and I really like one word album titles.


Tell us more about yourself …

Just some guitar playing bloke who posted some MP3s on the internet 3 years ago and it’s all grown from there. It’s all been very much a “word of mouth” process – I’ve been amazed – it’s really people telling their friends about my music and its spread from there. I’ve been very lucky.


And finally …


If you had the leading role in a hit movie, what film would you be in, and why?

I would like to be any film with Gene Wilder, ‘cause he’s great!


You are planning a dinner party to impress – what would you serve for the Main Course?

My wife’s Lasagne – it’s AMAZING!! Seriously cool mmmm.


And who would you invite to this meal, and why?

All my friends off the internet from all over the world – now that would be cool!


You’ve won the lottery (congratulations!) What would be your first purchase?

Why thank you. A nice recording studio in a nice house would make me very very happy!


Sum up your personality in five words:

Busy, Worried, Excited, Enthusiastic, Confused.
Keep a listen out for Matt’s tracks on the WowThankYou site over the coming months. If you have a Wow…How? idea, I’m sure Matt can provide suitable backing material! In the meantime, please do pop over to his website http://www.mattstevensguitar.com and have a listen to his music – it really is rather damn good!



Who else hates selling?

March 27th, 2010

By Gaye Weeks, A&V Designs

Ok – I know I am not alone when I say “I HATE SELLING!” I love designing and making the items (one-off or limited edition aprons, bags and cushions created from antique and vintage fabrics) I sell on my website and here at WowThankYou but the few times I have ‘girded my loins’ and tried to sell at a craft or specialist fairs I didn’t even cover the cost of my petrol, let alone stand fees. Plus, I hated every minute! I’ll work behind the scenes with matchsticks propping my eyelids open but ask me to even sell something of my own … so what’s to do? Can we WowThankYou sellers help each other or can WowThankYou help us in some other way?

As a designer/maker living in a very rural area (North Wales – everywhere is a long way from us) there is also the logistics of actually getting to a fair. There must be others of you out there with the same problem. Local people often find prices too high and I can’t afford the cash or the time to get myself down to the big fairs, many of which are in the South where I believe my market lives.

Maybe there are those of you who love selling and can think of some way to help? Maybe sell other people’s items on a commission basis? Or should we compile a ‘Help List’ of people in all areas (do you have relatives or friends who love to sell?) who we salesphobes could employ at a reasonable rate?

So let’s open this up for discussion, ideas and comments please!



GimmeThatThing

March 12th, 2010

At the age of 4 my mother started attending a local pottery evening class and would often bring bits of work home to finish off. I remember sitting for what seemed like hours while she sketched me in order to create my head in clay, and would bribe me with scraps of clay to encourage me to remain static. I would play for hours with this wonderful stuff, making basic coil pots, squishing them up and starting over again. I loved the feeling of this medium in my hands as well as its earthy smell. When I studied Art and Design at Manchester Polytechnic a few years later I hoped to get involved in the ceramics department but with a tight schedule and so many aspects of design to cover, I never got my chance to be a potter.

Five years ago, now in my 40s and studying for a Masters degree in something desperately serious, I discovered an afternoon class in beginners’ ceramics that would fit in with my university lectures and rediscovered my creative skills. I worked my way through the various levels, starting to bring clay home to make utility ceramics that my tutor would not have allowed me to produce in class and was lucky enough to be able to fire my work in the college kiln. Eventually the class fell victim to cut backs and I was left without a pottery class. So I put the word out that I was looking for a kiln of my own. One of my tutors offered me hers, used only 3 times and at a bargain mates’ rates price and against every ceramicist’s advice I installed it in my spare bedroom. For me the joy of having my own kiln is that I can fire what I like when I like and any firing mistakes (which used to occur frequently at the pottery classes) are all my own.

Black and White Ceramic Rings

I am also able to choose from the huge ranges of glazes on offer instead of having to stick to the dull, sludgy colours that the classes provided. I started my glaze collection with black, white, transparent and all the moss and sage greens I could find. My latest glazes are flame red and antique gold and there are still so many that I want to get my hands on. Ceramics is proving to be a worthwhile hobby for me. As soon as I started running out of shelf space in my home for my creations I began selling at local craft fairs and found that other people liked my work. Now I specialise in small and decorative pieces that I can incorporate into my jewellery designs and even receive wholesale orders from time to time.

Ceramic Brooches

The first time I fired up my kiln I was absolutely terrified. I had armed myself with special goggles and heat resistant gloves which the manuals had told me were basic and essential protective gear that everyone should use. Needless to say, three years later they are still in the packaging and I have never had a need to use them yet. Armed with instruction manual, this intrepid potter carefully loaded the kiln for the first time ever and flung the window open to ensure that none of those toxic chemicals that are present in the clay would wipe out the population of south Manchester. My kiln does not have an automatic programmer and so I have to increase the temperature gradually every hour or two hours depending on whether I am doing a bisque or glaze firing, which means that an alarm clock is vital in the procedure.

Green and Pewter Ceramic Ring

The hardest part of using the kiln for me is still loading the kiln with glazed pieces. As ceramicists know, pieces must not touch each other as they would just fuse together in the heat, and nobody wants a huge chunk of glazed clay to come out of the kiln instead of the masterpieces that are expected. I can spend a long time trying to fit all my work into the space in my small kiln and have been known to remove and rearrange for hours. It is rather like a jigsaw puzzle and I invariably find that there are a couple of pieces that just have to wait until the next firing session. The small pieces used in my jewellery are great kiln fillers as they will fit perfectly between larger items. This is how my ceramic buttons originated when I realised that there was an awful lot of dead space being heated at each firing. So nowadays the kiln is more efficiently loaded with less unused space.

After a glaze firing has ended the potter is supposed to wait for around 24 hours before opening the kiln door or lid, but even after three years firing experience I simply cannot wait that long. After around 15 hours I just have to take a quick look. I never know how my work is going to turn out. It all depends on where in the kiln an item has been positioned, close to a wall, on a high or low shelf as these factors can mean a different temperature and exposure to the heat. I do have to wait for my daughter to come home from school before unloading as we can share the ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ moments together as we see these creations in all their glory for the first time.

Visit Amanda’s WowThankYou store, Gimme That Thing, to view and purchase her wonderful jewellery.



Rocket Garden Offer: Who’s having yours?

February 25th, 2010

OK, not technically hand made in the UK, but definitely home grown on British soil, Rocket Gardens are the quickest, most exciting way to ‘grow your own’ at home. A Rocket Garden gift card is a fantastic present – the recipient, when they redeem their card online, will receive a box of baby plants when they’re in season. It’s a brilliant way to give those ‘hard to buy for’ people an eco-friendly, tasty and great fun present. There’s no easier way to get someone started growing their own. In next to no time they will be eating fresh food straight from the garden for months to come! No experience necessary!

All you have to do is select your choice of Rocket Garden and you’ll receive a voucher with instructions about how to redeem it either online or freepost. You’ll then receive a box brimming full of baby plants direct to your door and ready to pop straight into the ground. Easy!

And this Spring, growing your own Rocket Garden can also help you inspire a friend to get growing, too. When you order a Rocket Garden Voucher you’ll also receive a free Mini Starter Garden to pass on to someone else. Simply buy and redeem your voucher before 1st June 2010 to receive your free Mini Starter Garden.*

So, who are you going to give yours to?

*Free Mini Starter Garden will be delivered at the same time as a Rocket Garden, and to the same delivery address. Each will contain a mixture of 24 seasonal vegetable and salad plants.



WowThankYou are proud to sponsor The Cystic Fibrosis Trust during 2010

February 25th, 2010

2010 is going to be a great year. Not only is WowThankYou launching onto the information superhighway, but we’re hoping to raise a healthy sum of money for our Charity of the Year too, The Cystic Fibrosis Trust, and have fun along the way.

We want the entire ‘Wow’ community to help support this great charity. We have a number of fundraising ideas to put to you all, which we hope you’ll embrace and be part of. But more of that later – first, let me tell you about our charity, and why we’ve chosen this one specifically.

About Cystic Fibrosis
Cystic Fibrosis (CF) is one of the UK’s most common life-threatening inherited diseases, affecting over 8,500 people in the UK. Over 2 million people in the UK carry the faulty gene that causes CF (approx. 1 in 25 of the population). If two carriers have a baby, there is a 1 in 4 chance that he/she will have CF. Cystic Fibrosis affects the internal organs, especially the lungs and digestive system, by clogging them up with thick sticky mucus, making it hard to breathe and digest food. Every week, five babies are born with CF – each week, three young lives are lost to it.

Both sides of my family have links to Cystic Fibrosis. My husband is a carrier and, sadly, two of his first cousins died of CF when they were aged just 3 months and 13 years old. I was personally made aware of the disease when the bubbly, happy wife my own cousin died of it, aged 29. I was 19 at the time, and it was the first funeral I’d attended where the deceased was barely older than me.
Luckily I’m not a carrier, but my two young children might be. My husband’s cousins died in the 1960s, when a CF child was lucky to survive beyond the age of 5 – today, the average life expectancy is around 35. It is getting better, but it isn’t good enough.

There is no cure. The best hope is gene therapy and continued pharmacological research. The Cystic Fibrosis Trust, founded in 1964, is the UK’s only national charity dedicated to all aspects of Cystic Fibrosis. They fund research to treat and cure CF and aim to ensure appropriate clinical care and support for people with Cystic Fibrosis. WowThankYou aims to raise as much money as we can for the CF Trust to help them carry on their good work – and we hope you’ll all be happy to support the cause too …

Our fundraising ideas
WowThankYou has a dedicated Charity page. On it we hope to list items where a percentage or a set amount is donated to the CF Trust for each completed sale. This could be just a few pence – but collectively we hope we can raise a decent amount over the course of the year.

Jan Howarth, of JFY Collection, has generously designed and made some one-off Wow/CF charity jewellery items; an example of this is the gorgeous bracelet shown below. 100% of proceeds from these sales will go into the charity piggy bank.

‘Hope’ Pandora Bracelet

If you’d like to help us with either a donated item or an amount gifted from the sale of certain items, then please get in touch. Also, if you have any ideas of how we can raise money throughout the year from website-based activities, please let us know.

The ‘Big’ One …
What are your plans for October this year? We have a fundraising event idea that will warm the cockles of your heart … and bits a bit lower down too!

Fancy joining the Wow team and taking part in a sponsored Walk over Hot Coals? Come on – don’t dismiss it out of hand immediately! It’s still very much in the planning stage, but we are looking to gather as many of our artisans as we can, at a venue central to everyone (hopefully), where we can have a fun-filled afternoon/evening one weekend day during October 2010. We will be trained and guided by professionals throughout the day – what a fantastic way for us all to meet, chat (and support) each other?! It will be fun, seriously, it will! At this point in time the only other information that I can give is that we’re looking for a minimum of 30 people to make it a viable event, but there’s no upper limit. Each ‘walker’ will need to raise a minimum amount of sponsorship (£150 has been suggested) and there will be a small registration fee which will cover the cost of venue hire and the obligatory t-shirt (a designer statement in its own right!)

OK, it might not be on everyone’s list of ‘must do’s’, but it is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to try something outrageous and raise money for a good cause at the same time. We’ll make it a day to remember, so please do think about it, and if interested let us know. This isn’t the time to get cold feet … quite the opposite in fact!

What else can we do to raise money? We’re all one big collective family, so let’s throw some ideas around …



Welcome to Wow!

February 25th, 2010

“Hello!” We’ve made it! It has been, without doubt, the toughest four months of our lives! What started out as a work-in-progress idea has developed into the website you see here. We so hope you like it …

Over two years ago I (Tracey) bought the website name, with the intention of one day dipping my toe into the e-commerce marketplace. At the time I was up to my neck in writing work, so didn’t have time to breathe, let alone start another new business.  There was also the small issue of taking time out to have my, now 17mth old, son. Having been a self-employed journalist for 10 years, I know what it is like to work long, unsociable hours – yet I’ve still found these last few weeks hard going!

Georgena and Tracey

For me, WowThankYou represents a new start. I thrive being self-employed, but the uncertainty of where the next commission was coming from caught up with me and I wanted to become in control of my own destiny. So I had a website name and I knew I wanted to sell things – but I still didn’t know what. I was very much an admirer of a website selling gifts and items that were not typical High Street fodder (guess who!) and decided I’d quite like to do something loosely based on this theme. I didn’t want to work alone, so I chatted to Georgena, where we decided we wanted to ensure it was totally UK-based – and we’ve not looked back since. Between us, we have four children under the age of 5, so to say that WowThankYou has become a labour of love is an understatement, as we’ve somehow managed to juggle family life with setting this up, quite successfully considering.

So here we are! WowThankYou is going to be run as a business as we ultimately hope one day to earn a wage from it (once we’ve settled all the set-up costs). But we don’t want to exploit anyone. We want to enjoy our work; we want to help promote you and your work and to take time out to visit you at shows and build an informative, supportive community of artisans through our blog and face-to-face.

We’ve never done anything like this before, and the learning curve has been steep. We know there’s room for improvements, which is why we plan to start website ‘Phase II’ developments as soon as we’ve gone live. Your comments, questions and constructive criticism are valuable to us – we want this site to work for you, so we want you to be involved in how it develops. We will continue to be totally honest and upfront with everyone; in return, all we ask for is your support and occasional patience. We get very disheartened reading negative comments on forums, even though they are written by individuals who we’ve never had any communications with. We promise to do our best, but with everything there will be inevitable teething problems. If you have any problems with WowThankYou, or us, please do tell us about it so that we can try and sort things out. We can’t help unless we know what the problem is …

That’s enough of all that – we go live on 5 March 2010 – how fantastic is that! We are nervous, but it’s an excited nervous! All Press Releases will be sent out earlier in the day on the 4th – G and I are hoping to start celebrating early, as we’re waiting to find out if we’re being granted media passes to the Preview Evening of the Desire Jewellery & Silversmithing Fair, in Richmond, Surrey that evening … are any of you exhibiting there?

The launch day itself will be spent surrounded (supported!) by our families, here at WowHQ in Cambridgeshire. It’s my mum’s birthday that day, so a brief trip out to buy her lunch may well be on the cards – so long as our Blackberrys are fully charged!

To sum up this introduction, “Thank You” for putting your faith in us; we’re looking forward to getting to know you all, and “Cheers!” – Here’s to a successful and fun future.
Tracey & Georgena xx