Sew Hip!

I am rather excited by this - two of my photos are in the latest issue of Sew Hip! Woohoo!
My pictures are on the left hand side of the spreads, illustrating an article about wool felt. You can't really tell from my quick photos but they look really bright and cheerful in real life and made me grin quite madly when I picked up my copy from the newsagent. Many thanks to Sew Hip's sweetheart of an editor, Manda, for getting in touch!In case you've not heard of it yet, Sew Hip is a brand new sewing magazine that launched here in the UK last month. It's jam packed with patterns and crafty tips and interviews with awesome crafters like Betz White who makes the most amazing things from felted wool sweaters (you can check out her blog here).

Overall it feels very fresh and modern and it's very in tune with what I would call the Etsy generation: I recognised quite a lot of my fellow Etsians in its pages and it's packed with the sort of fabrics, projects and products that I usually only get to see by reading blogs. I'm quite delighted to have my photos rubbing shoulders with such loveliness!

I'm going to stop using exclamation marks now and go curl up with a nice cup of tea and finish reading all those articles...

Snowflake Curtain

Today I'd like to properly show off the snowflake curtain seen in the background of my star photo from yesterday - and showing off is absolutely the right phrase as I am dead chuffed with how it turned out!

The story behind this bit of Christmas craftiness is that we're switching from curtains to blinds in our kitchen, and currently have empty windows with the curtain rails and hooks still in place.... I've always loved making paper snowflakes to stick on the inside of our windows at Christmas but our current flat has such old single-glazed windows that we get terrible condensation, making paper snowflakes a no-go. A snowflake curtain seemed the obvious solution :)

The basic idea behind this is super-simple, but it does take some time! I'd heartily recommend it as a way to while away a winter evening or two, and if you've got kids you could get the whole family involved making snowflakes and put the final display together yourself.

All my paper snowflakes were made from folding circles of white paper (cut using an assortment of plates, saucers and cups as templates) and snipping away - you can find lots of tutorials on the internet if you've not made them before. They were sewn together in strands like these oak leaf garlands - just use an ordinary sewing needle and thread and sew several stitches per snowflake. Try and vary the sizes of snowflakes you use to get a "random" look - and I'd recommend hanging up each strand before starting the next one so you can see how they look and build up your display gradually:

I tied them onto the curtain rail hooks so I can move them carefully along the rail for different effects - they look very cool all bunched together - but you could secure them to a rail or piece of string, or use pins or blutack to keep them in place in your window. A few strands hung together would also make a fantastic mobile!

UPDATE: for a similar effect but much less effort, you could make a curtain or mobile using different sizes of white paper doilies for your snowflakes. Follow the instructions for my butterfly + doily curtain but just use lots more doilies instead of butterflies :)

Please feel free to borrow photos if you want to blog about this project, but remember to credit me and link back to the original source, and do not reproduce my tutorial on your site. Thanks!

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Your Votes Needed!

Edit: voting has now closed :)

I've entered a fun competition over on Folksy, and I'd love it if you guys could pop on over to the Folksy blog today and vote for meeeee ... No, seriously, please go check out all the entries and vote for your favourite - there have been some fab entries and the prize is pretty awesome (a whole year of free listings and commission-free sales on Folksy! very exciting stuff) so the more votes the merrier!

The brief was to create "a seasonal decoration for the home" ... "you must not buy anything new to make your decoration and the bulk of the materials used must be recycled / upcycled from things that you would usually have thrown away." I took the brief quite seriously and went for a rummage in our recycling bin... and ended up making this:
A modern Christmas star, made from 2 cardboard coffee cup trays - my boyfriend brings these home from work so we can recycle them -- plus red yarn leftover from a knitting project, foil wrappers from chocolate money (for a bit of bling), and a red sweet wrapper. I also used a small bit of PVA glue and sticky tape to help the yarn hold everything in place.

It looks exactly the same on the back, so it can spin happily and look lovely from all angles! This is what it looks like from the front...
... and it looks rather sculptural and interesting from the side too as it's hollow in the middle:
I photographed this by hanging it in my kitchen window amongst some paper snowflakes (another Christmas project, lots of pictures of this tomorrow), and sitting on the windowsill to get the best light. My neighbours no doubt now think me madder than ever, hehe.

Gift Wrap Ideas # 6: Fun with Fonts

Most gifts I wrap involve a tag somewhere along the line, but for a few parcels this year I'm skipping the tags and using names and other messages as the decorative element:

The idea behind this look is really simple - though it takes a little time to put into practice - and will make your parcels really stand out! I think it's an ideal way of decorating gifts for men and boys who (let's be honest now) probably have no interest in a "pretty" or "chic" looking parcel and can't undo a ribbon to save their lives. This is certainly the giftwrapping idea which has had the most positive response from my boyfriend!

First up you need to make some letter templates. Print out the letters you need using your computer - you'll need a pretty big font size but this will depend on the size of the presents you're wrapping, and remember to set them as "outline" to save ink! I used Arial set to bold to make nice fat simple letters, and I should have printed out a whole alphabet in different sizes to save time as I just kept thinking of more people this idea would be great for.

I just printed my letters onto paper but if you wanted to use them a few times (or just to make using them easier) you could print onto card instead. Cut them out and you've got your templates:

 

To really save time you could print the letters directly onto coloured paper... but doing it the long way you can use a variety of decorative papers or use up all those small pieces of giftwrap you get left-over after wrapping your parcels. Draw round each letter with a pencil and cut it out, remembering to reverse the letters so they're the right way round when you turn them over (if that makes sense!). Then use some prittstick-type glue (something light that won't seep through the wrapping paper you've used) and stick your message onto your parcel.

I used bright red giftwrap on nice shiny gold paper for nephews and neices who like something cheerful...

... and more muted, subtle choices for our friends - vintage sheet music and an old map of London...

 

... and lovely gold lettering on kraft paper, which is probably my favourite:

I'm sure you can think of lots of variations - letters cut from pictures in glossy magazines for example would work really well on brown paper, and plain white letters (nice and easy to print straight from your computer) would also look pretty cool.


Please feel free to borrow one or two photos if you want to blog about this project, but remember to credit me and link back to the original source, and do not reproduce my entire tutorial on your site. Thanks!

Enjoyed this gift wrapping idea? Buy me a "coffee" and help support my blog!



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