Free Spring Craft Ideas: Butterflies, Flowers, Bunnies and More!

If you're in the mood for some spring-themed crafting, here are lots of free tutorials to keep you busy...

Make a butterfly mobile from felt + felt beads, or brightly coloured card:

Use card to make butterfly napkin rings and other pretty accessories for a spring tea party:

Make a statement with big butterfly brooches, embellished with embroidery, sequins or mini buttons...

Or use felt and pairs of matching buttons to make these simple butterfly brooches:

Decorate with doilies and butterfly shapes cut from sugar paper - make a big butterfly curtain like mine, or a smaller spring mobile. Doilies and butterflies are also a great combo for spring gift wrapping.

Sew a folk-inspired floral brooch from felt and fabric:

 

 Use felt, pretty washi tape and a mini button to make a sweet and simple flower card:

 Stitch a flower in bright spring colours using this flower embroidery pattern:

Make a leafy felt brooch to pin to your jacket or spring sweater:

Wish someone luck with a felt four-leaf clover:

Or send a spring "hello!" with this simple leaf card:

Sew a whole set of bunnies from pastel felt...

... and use them to decorate a happy spring wreath:

You could also make bunnies from card, with this bunny gift box tutorial I designed for Tesco Living.

If you're stuck indoors because of spring showers, why not make a cute raincloud mobile? Or a cloud brooch!

If you've got a friend who's feeling under the weather thanks to a spring cold, make them a card to say "get well soon"...

... and if you really want to cheer them up, make them a rainbow box filled with sunshine!

And last but by no means least, sew Mr & Mrs blackbird from felt - these would make cute brooches or little ornaments:

Follow the links to find each tutorial.You'll find lots more free step by step projects and crafty ideas in my tutorial archive. Happy crafting! :)

P.S. For even more projects, try my books!  Super-Cute Felt includes lots of spring designs to make from felt, including pansy hair clips, a bird on a branch necklace, a bunny brooch and a butterfly cushion:

And in Super-Cute Felt Animals you'll find Boris the beautiful butterfly, Richard the colourful rabbit, Sheelagh the shy sheep, and a whole family of chickens:

Three Easy Valentine's Day Craft Ideas

This is an advertorial and I received a fee to create some Valentine’s Day crafts for https://www.tescoliving.com/making-and-doing

It looks like we're in for a wet and windy weekend, doesn't it? Perfect weather for staying indoors doing some crafting for Valentine's Day!

Valentine's Day isn't just about romantic dinners with chocolates and roses, it's also a great excuse to let your family and friends know you love them with a handmade card or gift.

I've designed three easy paper crafting projects that are lots of fun to make... wanna see them?

First up, there's a Valentine's printing project: use everyday things from your home like kitchen sponges and cotton buds to make pretty printed heart cards.

This is a great craft to do with young kids, but honestly I'm in my 30s and I had an absolute blast making these! Click here to see the cards and the step by step instructions.

Next up: make a Valentine's Day card with a secret, hidden message!

It might be because I read so many spy and mystery novels when I was a kid but I adore anything involving a secret message. Can you guess where the message is hidden? Click here for the full tutorial, including all the templates you'll need to make your cards.

Finally (and, not gonna lie, this is probably my favourite of the bunch), I made some bunny gift boxes.

Not boxes for putting bunnies in (sadly, as a box filled with bunnies would be pretty awesome) but boxes that look like bunnies. They have little fluffy tails and everything! For added cuteness, the bunny faces are made from heart-shaped pieces :)

The bunny gift boxes would be perfect for Valentine's Day gifts, or you could make a whole set over the next few weeks and use them for Easter instead.

I made a whole rainbow of bunny gift boxes, click here to see how they turned out and grab the templates for making your own.

Getting Crafty with Kirstie Allsopp

A few weeks ago I got invited to a lovely "taster" event for Kirstie Allsopp's Handmade Fair - a new craft fair being held in the gardens at Hampton Court this September.

Would I like to come to the V&A (one of my favourite places in the world) to drink tea, eat cake and do some crafting? Um, yes please!

After discovering a few days earlier how horribly hot the Tube can be in the very hot weather, I walked to the V&A via Kensington Gardens and (thanks to a delayed train) got there just in time for the start of the event.

Kirstie Allsopp welcomed us all and introduced us to papercutter Poppy Chancellor. Poppy gave us some useful papercutting tips (use a sharp blade, cut details first and always cut towards yourself) and we got cutting!

Poppy had designed pretty bunting flags, inspired by the V&A's Wedding Dresses exhibition. We each cut out a few flags and then they were all strung together to make the bunting at the end of the afternoon.

 

It turns out that papercutting is a huge amount of fun. I was pretty pleased with how my flags turned out - though they were a bit of a mess if you looked close up! Professional papercutting is probably not a career path I will be pursuing :)

It was really nice to sit and try something new, while chatting to the ladies sitting near me (lovely to meet you all!).

 

After we'd done lots of crafting it was time for a cuppa and some cake. The cupcakes were provided by the Hummingbird Bakery and they were quite delicious... and it was lovely to bump into Claire in the cupcake queue! 

 

 

Kirstie then told us all about The Handmade Fair, the joys of crafting and how she hopes every visitor to the fair will be able to experience that joy for themselves.

She said she'd wanted making and learning and community to be a central part of the day so the ticket price includes a skill workshop, a creative talk in the "super theatre" and a "grand make" with hundreds of crafters making together. There will also be free "sewing masterclasses" and Etsy will be running business workshops.

Kirstie and the team are also hoping to break the Guinness World Record for the longest line of pompoms - a challenge they're calline World Pomination.

At the end of the event, we were given the chance to visit the Wedding Dresses exhibition which was rather gorgeous, with a wide selection of very different dresses. It was especially nice to see photos of the dresses being worn alongside the garments themselves, so you could peer at the delicious textile details of fabrics and lace and beading but also see how they suited each bride.

 

After a quick visit to the V&A's fabulous shop, I went for a short walk around Kensington...

 

... and visited the Travel Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society.

Last year's exhibition was one of the things I visited on my first Nice Day Out last year! Just like last year, the photos were wonderful. The exhibition is also dotted with entertaining signposts pointing you in the direction of places near (the cafe) and far (Beijing, San Jose), real (the moon) and imagined (Mordor and Wonderland). 

 

I wanted to wait out the worst of the rush hour before catching my train home, so I sat near the Albert Memorial (looking particularly shiny in the sunshine!) for a while reading my book...

 

... then strolled back through the park enjoying the views.

Of course, I also had to stop and watch the bunnies (spotted a few days earlier) for a while before finally heading homewards.

 

Many thanks to the folks at the V&A and The Handmade Fair for the lovely crafty afternoon! If you're interested in attending the Fair or reading more about it, click here to visit their website.

P.S. Wanna see a little video filmed at the event? If you can't see the video below click here to watch it. I'm not in the video, but you may be able to spot me in this photo :)

London in the Sunshine... Plus: Bunnies!

My goodness the weather in July was amazing. So much sunshine! So many bright blue skies!

This is what the sky looked like when I headed into London for a Nice Day Out and the 4th Crafty Cuppa. Nice, huh?

 

No-one had let me know they were coming along to that particular Crafty Cuppa so I wasn't really expecting anyone to, but I would have felt terrible if someone had shown up and I'd not been there!

Normally I go and visit something like a museum or a gallery before the Crafty Cuppas, but I got up so late that day that my Nice Day Out ended up being a Nice Afternoon Out instead. Oops. So, I headed straight to the Museum of London and read my book for a bit until I was sure no-one was gonna show up. Then I went into the museum's lovely cafe, drank tea and read my book some more (it was a pretty good book).

 

 

 

I then had a look round some of my favourite galleries in the museum (it's a great place, and free to visit! I really recommend it if you've not been before) then decided to take advantage of the nice weather and go for a walk.

Just round the corner from the museum is Postman's Park (so called because it was a popular lunch spot for the workers of the nearby General Post Office headquarters) which is a surprisingly quiet little space for busy central London.

The park contains the fascinating Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice - a wall of ceramic tablets, commemorating men, women and children who lost their lives while attempting to save others. This is, as you might expect, a touching and at times heartbreaking memorial. If you're interested in reading some of the tablets you can find photos here.

 

Next I walked to nearby shopping centre One New Change, where they have a roof terrace with a great view over London (many thanks to the lovely person who left a comment on my blog telling me about this!). Typically, this was the moment the weather chose to cloud over but the views were still pretty good - especially the view of St Pauls!

 

After admiring the views I headed back down to street level and walked round St Pauls...

... and through Christopher Wren's Temple Bar gateway, which once stood where the Strand meets Fleet Street.

Then I walked to the Tube and headed to the National Portrait Gallery to visit this year's BP Portrait Award exhibition. Such an interesting variety of different portraits!

 

If things had gone to plan, this is where this blog post would have ended: with me heading homewards. Unfortunately, the hot summer weather made the Tube unbearably hot and I felt a little like I might faint (not good!) so I got off several stops early, at South Kensington.

The thought of getting back on the horribly hot Tube was not something I relished, so I decided to walk back to Paddington instead - taking a leisurely stroll through Kensington Gardens.

 

The park was looking lovely in the sunshine, and I stopped to have an icecream along the way (yum).

 

Then when walking along the Hyde Park side of the Long Water (right by the Henry Moore arch)  I stumbled upon something quite delightful: a patch of grass filled with bunnies! I counted a couple of dozen, nibbling the grass and leaping about, it was quite magical.

 

 

 
Watching them was incredibly relaxing (watch this little video I found of one of the Hyde Park bunnies and you'll see what I mean!), and a really lovely end to my day. A field full of bunnies beats an overheated Tube carriage full of sweaty armpits hands down :)