little 'jelly roll' patchwork pillow

i friend at work is the go-to lady on anything patchwork related. it was she who explained to me the wonder that it the jelly roll. i didn't get at first why anyone would want to buy such thin strips of fabric, but then she explained - you sew them together, then cut up what you've sewn, often perpendicular to to the stitching, and then stitch it together again. really easy way to make chessboard-type patchworks! and that is precisely what i had in mind for my little spare pillow...only i forgot that all that cutting would require me to take into account seam allowance, which of course i forgot about. so it's a stripy pillow rather than a checked pillow, but it's still quite cute so i'm happy:

 
i didn't actually use jelly rolls, i just cut girly fabrics i already had into strips so i could have a bit of a play, and yeh, it worked out well enough (if you pretend that stripes was what i was going for) so i might have to have another shot at this, using the real thing, and not being scrimpy with my seams.

patchwork quilt continued...

last august i started a patchwork quilt which, believe it or not, i am still working on. as i decided that i didn't want to buy any of the fabric for the quilt, and thus only use leftovers from other projects, it's taking longer than i originally thought it might. though as it requires 361 11cm squares, i guess i'm doing ok to only be this far:

sorry for the blurriness of the photo- it's almost the length of a double duvet now so to get it all in the photo i had to sit on my boyfriend's shoulders...despite this i still managed to cut a row of patches off the top there. it still needs to be a bit wider and slightly over twice the height, but i'm confident that i can get it finished before i leave uni in july. wish me luck!

butterfly headbands and flower hairbands

work was raising money for together for short lives at the weekend, so i made some hair things to sell to help raise funds : ) which was far easier and less scary than the face painting i ended up doing....all the children seemed to be happy with their butterfly face paints so i guess it went well, they just don't know how to keep still!!!! anyway, here are the butterfly headbands:

 

i was rushing slightly as they were made just before my shift - i had already wrapped embroidery threads around blank hair bands for another project that never finished, so all i had to do was cut out butterfly shapes from felt in different colours, and then cut the detailing out of black self-adhesive felt. which just leaves sticking one to the other and glue gunning the lot to the headband. for something so simple they ended up looking better than i had hoped! the flower hairbands were of the japanese-hair-flower variety, which turned out like this:

 

i'm pretty chuffed with these - they sold out! ...i may have bought the last one, but that still totally counts! : )

 

very small card holder

i have been having some rather entrepreneurial thoughts lately, awesome ideas that were going to make me my millions by crafting for maybe an afternoon a week. one such idea was that i was going to make baby dresses - people spend a ton on them and they use up very little fabric, however, now that the fabric i've been ordering has stared to arrive.....i just want to make myself things! plus, people who don't have babies but do have lots of baby dresses can be a bit strange. so! i was having a browse online to see what people make with pretty fat quarters, and found a super quick and easy card holder by the lady at the crafty cupboard (that was a link to the instructions). here's my one:

it uses almost no fabric. which makes this almost free as i used a tiny bit from a green fat quarter i picked up off etsy for something like 87p, and an even smaller piece from a pink fat quarter which i grabbed at work for £1. i did use wadding instead of fusible fleece, because, well, i had no fusible fleece and wadding worked out great : ) also i made one pocket longer than the other so the most frequently needed cards are easier to get to than say, the loyalty cards and tickets and gumpf:

the only thing i would change is that i would make the pockets just a tiny bit bigger as at present they won't hold more than like 4 cards each, though i guess that's probably enough for the essentials.

coptic/exposed tape book binding!

hello again! it's been a while but i'm back and full of crafty ideas and ambitions : ) one of which is to get really good at book binding....partly because i am prone to parting with quite a lot of money when i spy a pretty notebook, but mostly because i saw some really cool ones on folksy.

my fist attempt was just to get my head around the basic stitching, which i can only describe as being something between embroidery chain stitch and and a crochet chain. there are already lots of good tutorials, youtube videos etc. online explaining how it works (here's good), they all make it look and sound far more complicated than it is, just stick with it a bit and you'll be fine. my first one looks like this:

(please excuse the chipped nail polish!)

it went quite well so i am rather pleased, however i did make a few mistakes - i made the covers the same size as the pages...so they're a tad too small really, also, the card i used was quite thin, which resulted in it having a slightly less-than-professional feel to it. but the fabric i covered it with is cool so that kind of makes up for it:

also, not having a guillotine meant that it took a while to sort the pages, and that when they were folded into groups, the pages stuck out more towards the centre of each grouping than at the edges. this lead to my second attempt, which involved larger, stiffer covers and a quick borrow of my work's guillotine:

it's square, black, has black pages and incorporates velvet ribbon in the spine. the tape method here involves laying a piece of ribbon across the spines of your pages, doing a large stitch over it for a few spines, once you've done 3 or 4, the next one you use to tie the others together to make a sort of cluster....ok, my descriptive abilities are not on top form today. it looks like this:

to be honest, so long as the holes you've pierced in your pages all line up, you could do any kind of stitching and it'll probably look quite good. plus it's fun, fairly cheap as far as crafts go, and you end up with an almost gender-neutral and useful thing to keep or give : )

vintage style yarn wreath with felt birds

another piece of work i took home to do, my brief was to make a wedding/spring wreath. i didn't think the traditional spring pastel colours really lent themselves well to a wedding theme, so i went with a more vintagy thing instead...at which point i learnt just how hard it is to make things look 'vintage' without making them look 'old-womany'. here;s how it went:

i wrapped (very cheap) cream wool around the polystyrene ring, used sequin pins to attach peach coloured pearl beads all over and glue-gunned peach roses and a mossy-green bow to the bottom of it. next came the hard bit - what sort of birds won't make this all look terribly old ladyesque? i tried needle felting a couple first, that was a mistake, then i tried crochet lace, they were even worse, i mean, in there own right they were very pretty, but on the wreath they looked awful. so i did some minimalist dove type things out of felt with a bit of lace ribbon along the edges of the wings...i think i might have gotten away with it : s

vintage style mother's day cards

work sent me home with a little do craft mother's day card pack, it makes two cards....these are not quite the cards given on the label, but with some artistic licence, and some ribbons and bits, i made these:

they're somewhat super cheesy : ) but that's kind of what i was going for so i guess that means they're a success. buttons, ribbons, lace and doilies seem to be the thing at the moment, one thing i will say; double sided sticky tape - it doesn't stick things to velvet for very long, use wet glue instead.