September in Pictures: Bargain Threads & a Gift-Wrapping Challenge

Time for a look back at my Instagram photos from September...

This month I scored the bargain of the year, getting a whole heap of embroidery thread at John Lewis for just 10p a skein (that's 90% off the normal price! crazy!). Sadly the offer has finished now, but I am not going to run out of embroidery thread any time soon.

Hilariously, a few days after buying all those threads I had to buy some more as I didn't have the exact colours I needed for an in-progress project. Typical!

Of course, I couldn't resist arranging all the threads in colour order so I could a) see what colours I'd bought b) store them in colour groups for easy-access and c) ooh over their loveliness. All together now: ooooooooh...

I've been busy behind the scenes working on new projects, but I also started a fun new personal project - setting myself the challenge to come up with 100 gift wrapping ideas. I'm sharing the ideas on Instagram as I go along, then blogging about them in batches. So far I've shared ten ideas - click here to read all about them.

I'm hoping to have some free afternoons to do some more gift-wrapping soon!

I also blogged about some of my crafty projects and beloved toys from my childhood, including the felt fashions I stitched for my Sylvanian Families. It's been so lovely rediscovering all this stuff and sharing it with you guys - and hearing all your stories about your own childhood treasures.

I squeezed a few Nice Days Out into September, though I haven't yet had time to blog about them (though I did finally blog about my visit to Seville Cathedral many months ago!).

I spent a busy day in Oxford exploring the Colleges and other interesting buildings during the annual Oxford Open Doors weekend. Balliol was particularly swoonworthy:

I also used my Art Pass to visit Eltham Palace (wonderful!)...

... and spent an afternoon at Tate Britain, enjoying the architecture and revisiting some of my favourite paintings.

I simply had to take a snap of the platform at Pimlico on my way home. This kind of urban patchwork makes me so happy - all those blocks of colour! It reminds me of a painting but I can't for the life of me think which one.

I also popped into The Village Haberdashery to deliver some samples for the classes I'll be teaching there this autumn - you can learn to make an autumn wreath, a weather-themed baby mobile or these vintage-inspired Christmas ornaments.

Annie from The Village Haberdashery also interviewed me for their shop blog, The Daily Stitch. We chatted about my crafty childhood, how I started my business, the early days of craft blogging and the realities of making stuff for a living.

In other September news...

... I am trying to send more Proper Post and bought some awesome stamps for sending my letters (the Agatha Christie ones include tiny writing and other clues to the mysteries! So cool).

... the Partridge & Pear Wreath I made last year was republished in Mollie Makes Christmas (it even made the cover, which is always fun!).

... I finally bought wadding and backing fabric for the Christmas quilt I'm sewing for my sister. I'm hand quilting it, so there's lots of hours of stitching still to do. No prizes for guessing how I'm spending my evenings at the moment!

... and I got new glasses! I'd had the same glasses for over five years, and the same style for over a decade so this new look took a while to get used to. Change is hard, guys. I love them now though, hurrah!

I'll share another Instagram round-up next month :)

I'm lauralupinhoward on Instagram - click here to visit my page and follow me. You'll also find me on Facebook and Twitter.

Childhood Crafting: Sylvanian Families Furniture

As well as making felt fashions and lots of mini fake food for our Sylvanian Families when we were kids, we also decorated our homemade Sylvanian houses with handmade furniture. Here are some of the things I made for mine (recently rediscovered in a box in our attic).

Kitchen cabinets and an oven!

 

Shelves made from matchboxes, old tissue boxes and the trays from chocolate boxes; beds made from card with faux-woodgrain sticky back plastic headboards; mini cupcake cases for lampshades; off-cuts of carpet and fluffy fabric for doormats; a sofa made from tights packaging; and pillows made from scrap fabric sewn round cotton wool balls.

I think you would call this look "recycling box chic". I had a big box in the bottom of my wardrobe full of little cardboard boxes and other stuff I thought might come in handy for making stuff... and this is the sort of stuff it became.

The kitchen units are particularly adorable. The happy hours that must have gone into making them!

The counter-tops are made with off-cuts of vinyl flooring from my parents' DIY projects, and the cupboards are all decorated with faux woodgrain sticky back plastic.

The oven has an extractor hood (another bit of vinyl flooring) and cardboard hot plates on the hob (there were originally four, one seems to have fallen sometime in the past 25 years). The doorknobs are brass fasteners from the stationery department and the doors open and close.

The cabinet is made from an old toothpaste box, the drawers in the cabinet are made from two matchboxes stuck together...

... and there's a matching chopping board, too (made from a rectangle of vinyl covered in yet more sticky back plastic).

The kitchen sink is a little cardboard box lined with foil and sunk into the top of the cabinet. The foil looks quite thin (not like kitchen/baking foil), so I guess I must have saved it from something like a KitKat.

Who needs a store-bought dollshouse when you have a fancy kitchen like that?

Missed my earlier posts about this box of treasures? Click here to see my Sylvanian Families collection, and here to see the food and fashions we made for our Sylvanians when we were kids. 

Childhood Crafting: Fashions & Food for our Sylvanian Families

In the box of Sylvanian Families stuff we found in our attic, there was some Sylvanian furniture and some Sylvanian Families themselves (of course!) ... but the real treasures were the homemade bits and pieces we'd made as kids to accompany the store-bought stuff.

As you can see, I've been making things from felt for a looooong time.

I stitched these very stylish hats, shawl and bag for my rabbit family - and I also replaced the buttons on Mr Rabbit's dungarees when they fell off, and knitted a cosy wrap for Grandma Rabbit (luckily small pretend rabbits don't care how bad you are at knitting). 

 

I distinctly remember making a wedding dress and veil at one point, and one Christmas I carefully (and secretly!) made hats and jackets from felt for all my sisters' Sylvanians, wrapping them up in teeny handmade cardboard boxes which I then hung on the Christmas tree like ornaments. If those fashions ever turn up, I will be sure to take photos to share with you all.

As well as making clothes, I made lots of little things to decorate my (homemade) Sylvanian house.

Anticlockwise from bottom left: pieces of fabric that sat in a basket next to the sewing machine;"flannels" for the bathroom; an umbrella stand (for the paper cocktail umbrellas my parents brought back from a party) made from half a cocktail stick box covered in faux-woodgrain sticky back plastic; "skeins of yarn" made from embroidery thread and yarn; a paper fan; a beaded "necklace"; and two tiny "letters" which were tucked in the drawer of the dressing table.

My sisters and I loved making stuff from Fimo and we made lots of fake food for our Sylvanians to take on picnics. Fake fruit, fake hamburgers, tiny fake sandwiches and fake iced buns (complete with fake cherries on top). So cute!

I also made some tiny packets of food for the kitchen shelves. Each packet is a tiny handmade box, filled with toy stuffing (to help keep its shape) and decorated with tiny pictures and text like "ingredients" and "best before".

Top row: Jelly, Sugar Cane, 400g Lentils, Flour, Cheese & Noodle Soup.
Middle row: Carrot & Cauliflower Soup, Cornflour, Icing Sugar, Tomato Soup, Vegetable Soup.
Bottom row: Birds Eye Custard, Self-Raising Flour, Selection of Fruit Herbal Teas.

Look how teeny they are!

Good work, younger self, good work.

My Childhood Sylvanian Families Collection

More treasures from our attic clear-out: Sylvanian Families!

I definitely collected Sylvanian Families more than I really played with them as a kid.

My sisters and I each had one family - mine were the grey rabbits. My parents used cardboard boxes to build us an apartment block style dolls house, with one vertical row of boxes each which we could decorate as different rooms.

We used carpet and wallpaper off-cuts and mixed our store-bought furniture (all lovingly, carefully chosen after much deliberation and on a limited pocket money budget) with homemade things.

I just loved looking at all the teeny pieces. A bookcase with tiny books! A bath with a teeny cork in the plughole! A sink with a tiny bar of soap! A sewing machine with little scissors and reels of thread.

Drawers that really opened! Charming old fashioned furniture like a dressing table and a rocking chair and a fancy rotary phone!

It was such a joy opening up a box and finding all these things... especially as I'd also kept some of the handmade furniture and accessories we'd made. I'll blog about those soon, they definitely deserve their own post.

In the meantime, check out my posts about other rediscovered childhood collections:

My shell collection...

... my badge collection...

 

... my sticker collection...
 

... and my eraser collection.

You might also enjoy reading about puzzles and games from my childhood, more childhood treasures, Fuzzy-Felt Fairytales and beloved kids books.