Laura Minter and Tia Williams are your everyday mum’s, they’re genuine, hard working, loving parents. Oh, and they have two published arts and crafts books with one on the way. So they’re kinda cool mum’s!
Based in Brighton, the two decided to develop a blog back in 2013 called, Little Button Diaries, which focus on arts and crafts as well as recipes, good and naughty! The blog has now become very popular with fellow parents. In 2014, they won Best Craft Blog at the Mum and Dad Blog Awards and a 2015 Brilliance Blog Award in the crafts section. Just this week, they were nominated once again for a Brilliance Blog Award where you can vote for them through their website.
Tia used to work as an environmental advisor and studied linguistics at University, focusing on child language acquisition and disorders. Contrastingly, Laura was a primary school teacher and former Radio Producer.
Following their success, they have contributed to The Sun, and magazines like Creativity, Essentials, Mollie Makes and companies like, Laura Ashley, Paperchase and Hobbycraft.
The books are fun exciting activities for the parent and child to make and personalise. They focus on music, dressing up, games and role play. The activities are open to people with little to no experience in craft.
The activities are to make bow and arrows to princess tutu’s and all of the craft can be made from simple household items or things you can easily pick up from your local craft store. The Brighton Journal decided to meet up with the talented authors and have a chat about their success.
Thanks for meeting up with us today,we know you’re busy mum’s! (baby screaming in background) Not at all, we’re very happy to do it, don’t mind me I’m just changing my babies nappy.
I’ll get right to it then! You’re both from very different backgrounds professionally, so what made you two bump heads over the blog? Me and Laura have been friends for years, we met at Cardiff University many years ago when we were both studying, well, failing Italian. Laura moved to Brighton and then I did eventually. We’ve both been ‘craftsy’ forever so it just kind of made sense.
Do you think coming from your backgrounds influenced your books and blog? Laura: I was a teacher so that has definitely influenced me. I taught for five years and of course you pick up many things about what stimulates a child, and gets them excited. You see how certain things develop a child and crafts has always done that for children in my experience.
What made you start thinking about making these books? Laura: After we got started on our blog, we started to get more and more likes and comments from people. So we started to think about the next stage, and we came to the same conclusion that writing a book was a dream for both of us, and more importantly, we felt our content would work in a book. We wanted to write a book we would want to read. GMC Publications approached us after we won a Brilliance Blog Award last year and we started developing ideas.
Do you think books and activities like this are more important now than ever as children seem to become hooked on tablets and video games from such an early age? Laura: It’s terrifying, I have an iPad for my child like many others, and sometimes I worry he is on it too much, but these things like arts and crafts are so important at this age. It’s important for language learning and using your hands and brains rather than switching off and not learning anything. You develop closer relationships with your children by working on fun activities.
Finally, what do you two creative mum’s attribute you your success to?Tia: We do put a lot of energy, time and passion into it. Being together is great because we have slightly different craft skills, so the reader gets slightly different things from each of us and we motivate each other. We have four children between us so everything we make is with our children and we see if they enjoy the whole process, so if it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t go in.
Thank you for your time and good luck with the blog and books!
