It would be an understatement to say we have been very, very busy since our last blog post, in fact I’m not entirely sure I remember how to write. So I am going to pass the buck so to speak and share with you a blog post that was written by the fab Nicky Sherwood at From Britain WIth Love.

Nicky guest wrote a blog piece for the newly launched in the UK MyWedding.com and kindly featured two of our prints. Here it is in full technicolour glory:

http://www.mywedding.com/blog/uncategorized/a-very-british-celebration-by-from-britain-with-love/

It seems our very first ever design, the Quintessentially British print, has found love in a new home. Last week we were suddenly getting lots of enquiries from Australia for our Quintessentially British print and tea towel which has the phrase “A Nice Cup Of Tea” (in a proper bone china cup) along the central cross of the Union Jack. After a bit of digging we found that one of our prints that we had sent over to Australia last year, had been photographed in a ‘before and after’ feature in the Australian Real Living magazine, and beautifully photographed at that.

The tea towel is currently out of stock (due to a sudden rush of overseas purchases!) but more are being printed as we speak. They make great gifts to send to family and friends overseas, we’ve even had parents pack their children off with them when going on exchange visits as a gift for the host family.

It’s lovely to see our first ‘baby’ in the spotlight again, she’ll always have a soft spot in my heart!

Those lovely people at Sheerluxe.com have just featured my lovely Personalised Signature Dish Print 

Mum’s Home Cooking

Show her how much you appreciate her lovingly-made home meals and immortalise her culinary masterpiece forever with Betsy Benn’s Signature Dish print. Simply send them the recipe and any other quirky or personal information you want included and they’ll post it off a week later.

A thoroughly thoughtful Mother’s Day gift.”

As I’m beginning to understand, adverts, much like buses, seem to come along in two’s. Earlier last month I was honoured to have my Personalised Destination Print shown not once but twice in NotOnTheHighStreet.com’s first TV advert.

Now, I’m just as chuffed to have my Personalised Quotation Print take pride of place in the TV advert for the NOTHS.com Mother’s Day campaign. Our first Personalised Quote Print

Betsy Benn's Personalised Quotation Print

came about after we were asked to create a very special print for one of the founders of notonthehighstreet.com by none other than her Mum.

Betsy Benn Personalised Quotation Print as seen in NOTHS.COM’s advert

As well as that, my Personalised Quote Print makes it a hat trick of front covers for Not On the High Street Catalogues after our Personalised Destination Print featured on last years Valentines Day catalogue, and our favourite Personalised Family Values Print was the face of the Winter Catalogue.

Lastly, Betsy Benn has outgrown it’s humble home and is moving to a purpose built office at the end of the garden! Updates and photo’s coming soon!

While I was watching the news on Sunday night they had a piece about the economy and retail in general. This story included an interview at NotOnTheHighStreet.com headquarters with the very clever Holly Tucker who was explaining how they were growing and doing so well.

I’d recently been commissioned by them to do a supersize family values canvas for their reception area, and I had hoped that it might be in shot for a millisecond!

Not On The High Street Commissioned Family Values Canvas by Betsy Benn

So picture the enormous grin on my face when the opening shots were of Holly and a team member discussing one of my designs – the lovely Personalised Quotation Print and poking out from underneath it the universally popular Personalised Destination Print which was a finalist in the NOTHS Make awards last year.

Have a look here to see the clip for yourself - Not On The High Street on the news feat. Betsy Benn’s Designs

So Valentine’s is well and truly over for another year, but with this February being a leap year, I can’t help but wonder how many ladies will sieze the opportunity to ask their fellas the big question! I proposed to my own chap in a leap year, but I couldn’t wait and did it a month early at the back of a gig – who says romance is dead!

Betsy Benn’s Personalised Destination Bus Blind Print

It certainly isn’t for one of our happy customers, Chris. He sent us this photo recently of his intended and the unique way in which he proposed to her before Christmas. Chris had already bought one of our prints quite a bit earlier on in their relationship, celebrating their first ten dates. So he thought it appropriate and romantic to propose to her in the same way. Happily she said yes! (but who wouldn’t with grand romantic gestures like that.)

So they are in the thick of wedding planning now and I have it on good authority that the lovely Routemaster bus theme will be continued on the big day itself. So many congratulations to the happy couple from everyone here, we hope you have many more fantastic adventures together.

How’s that for a feel good Friday sign off? Have a good weekend everyone.

Betsy’s website has been in need of a little bit of tlc for a while to cope with the ever increasing volume of traffic and orders. Thankfully we found the rather lovely DX3Webs who have turned out to be really rather wonderful. They migrated the sites painlessly from the previous hosts, set up a duplicate development system for us, added this rather lovely blog facility, made our site even safer and encrypted and secured and transferred all of the email to the virtual cloud.

All of this was done with the minimum of fuss and with as much help as we needed. Now we have the ability to serve you, Betsy’s customers, far faster and with less fuss and hopefully no computer issues! So, thank you DX3 for your help and assistance and we look forward to a long and happy hosting with you!

Betsy Benn’s Webmaster xx

I’ve always wanted to say that and now, thanks to NotOnTheHighStreet.com I can!

I once made a special Personalised Destination Print for one of the founding partners, Holly Tucker, detailing the special places along the journey so far of this incredible company.

The print has a home in the Richmond offices, but if you look at their rather lovely advert that supports the Valentines campaign (my Couples Destination Print features) you’ll see this Personalised Destination Print not once, but twice!

It’s a lovely advert, and new ground for NotOnTheHighStreet, so we hope it works out brilliantly for them (okay and us!). Press play and see what you think.