Rosettes for Champion Tea Drinkers

Drinking tea isn't a sport, but if it was I think us Brits would be quite good at it! I definitely know a few people who'd be good candidates for an Olympic tea-drinking team.

My new brooches are perfect for tea lovers - prize rosettes decorated with cute teapot buttons.

I finished sewing them yesterday, and they're now available over in my shop on Etsy, in blue, pink, brown and purple. I'll be adding them to my shop on Folksy and to my website later today.

Scraps and Rosettes

On Monday I watched The Illusionist (which A made me blub and B made me want to start planning a trip to Edinburgh!) and cut out some felt shapes ready for sewing some bluetit brooches and auricula brooches. Even the leftover scraps look rather lovely:

Yesterday (Tuesday) I'd been planning on taking a trip into London to visit the V&A for a bit of inspiration but I wasn't feeling too well so had to postpone it in favour of a restful day on the sofa. Boo.

To cheer myself up I decided to have an impromptu "making day" and to work on a new design... The end result? Rosette brooches for champion tea drinkers:

Naturally, I drank lots of mugs of tea while working on these!

Each one will be decorated with a cute teapot-shaped button...

... and they'll be available in four colourways, hopefully sometime soon. I'll keep you updated!

P.S. talking of re-arranged plans, I'll draw the giveaway winners tomorrow :)

Best in Show (day 345)

Yesterday was exactly the sort of day when - in the olden days, before my Crafting 365 project - I would've thought myself too busy to do any sewing and a day would have passed without creativity or the satisfaction that comes from making things. But with my 365 project in mind, as it got late I rummaged round for a quick project to do a bit of work on and found three brooches in my wip (work in progress) box waiting to be sewn together...
... a nice quick bit of sewing before bed, and now I have two rosettes and a medal all finished. Hurrah! The boyfriend approves most of the medal, but I am rather in love with the pink rosette. It is bringing out all my most girly pink-loving tendancies: it's "just frilly enough" and so darn cute!
(Please excuse the blue-tinged photos! Taking snaps in a hurry this morning cos my camera battery was about to die. The colour in the top picture is much more accurate).

As ever with new designs, you just don't know how things are going to work out until you actually "try them in felt"... I wasn't sure how to do the stitching on the star & heart shapes so I tried two different ways - I definitely prefer how the heart looks so I'll be sticking with that. Also I need to remember to make sure that the felt "ribbon tails" at the bottom of the rosettes don't disappear into the main body of the brooch as I'm sewing it together (as seems to have happened with the yellow one).

Felt Brainstorming

Last night (crafting 365 day 331) I sat down with a big pile of felt (two big piles, actually) and tried out a few ideas that have been bouncing round my head for a while. Just like getting ideas "down on paper" it's great to get things "down in felt" and on their way from being a vague notion in my mind to an actual finished product.

Waiting to finish one thing properly when you've got lots of ideas bubbling can be a bit disruptive when you're in the "zone", so I just stitched the pieces together roughly at the end of the evening (so they can be put away and stitched properly later). Please ignore the random bright pink stitching!I'm working on a prototype crown (and a girly "princess" version), a medal, rosettes, and a large floral corsage and floral crown. The crowns - like all my "dressing up" items - are not really designed with children in mind, but instead designed to fit people like me who have difficulty thinking of themselves as "grown ups" :)

In other news, I picked the first ripe strawberry today from our little balcony "garden" and am feeling very proud: