Bit of a crazy day today, so no real post from me and (many apologies) still no butterfly template for yesterday's tutorial. I'll add it as soon as I get a chance, I promise!
Also coming soon: more butterfly-themed tutorials, my second knitting project of the year, lots of crockery photos (inspired by the lovely Kirsty), plus some new products over in my supplies shop as soon as I get them all photographed etc.
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
Tuesday, 3 February 2009
Butterflies for Spring
Forgetting for the moment that it's been snowing this week and still very much feels like the middle of winter... spring is just around the corner and I can't wait. To bring a bit of springtime into my house already, I've taken down the snowflakes in my kitchen and replaced them with a pretty new curtain of butterflies:
It's rather hard to take a good photo of them, but they are making my kitchen look rather lovely!
They're super-simple to make, and cheap too and the effect is very dramatic... though of course you don't have to have a full curtain like me. This would adapt nicely to be a sweet mobile.
You need some coloured paper (I used sugar/construction paper, some gift-wrap and the patterned insides of a few envelopes), some scissors, a needle and white thread, some glue (I used pritt stick) and a pack of white paper doilies - I bought mine from my always awesome local cake shop, they cost me less than £2 for a pack of 30 in assorted sizes. Bargain!
First make your template. Draw your own butterfly or print out the one at the end of this post, cut it out and glue it to some card (eg a cereal box) and cut it out again. Voila: one butterfly template. Use your template to draw & cut out as many butterflies as you want, perhaps whilst tucked up somewhere warm watching your favourite film?
.JPG)
If you wanted to be really fancy, you could print out butterflies in different sizes and have small, medium and large butterflies in your curtain - I of course only thought of this possibility after I'd finished my curtain, but I think it could look rather nice.
Once you've got an assortment of butterflies, start planning your curtain. Spread out the doilies how you'd like them to hang and place the butterflies on and around them. You want to get a nice mix of shapes, sizes and colours and to hang some of the butterflies on their own and some glued to the doilies (you will need two butterflies for this, one on each side). Here are all my pieces spread out on my kitchen counter:
When you're happy with the arrangement, glue all the butterflies to their doilies and then very carefully thread all your pieces together. You need an ordinary sewing needle and a long piece of white thread for this. Knot one end and starting at the bottom of the bottom doily or butterfly, sew 4-8 stitches through each paper piece leaving a small gap between each so they can move easily.
This can be quite fiddly, and it's best to go as slowly as possible and take real care than to get yourself tangled up or tearing the paper - if you're making this with kids you probably ought to do this bit yourself.
Once you've reached the top, use the thread to hang the strand where you want it, and sit back and watch your butterflies flutter....
This is the butterfly template - double click to view full size and print out. If you print at 100% your butterfly will be the same as mine, just change the % to make smaller or larger butterflies. Please be nice and only use this template for non-commercial use: you can use it for as many fun craft projects as you like and to make gifts for friends but not to make anything which you then sell. Thanks!
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!
Enjoyed this free tutorial? Buy me a "coffee" and help support my blog!
Subscribe to my newsletter for a monthly free pattern and visit my crafty tutorial archive for lots more free projects.
It's rather hard to take a good photo of them, but they are making my kitchen look rather lovely!
They're super-simple to make, and cheap too and the effect is very dramatic... though of course you don't have to have a full curtain like me. This would adapt nicely to be a sweet mobile.
You need some coloured paper (I used sugar/construction paper, some gift-wrap and the patterned insides of a few envelopes), some scissors, a needle and white thread, some glue (I used pritt stick) and a pack of white paper doilies - I bought mine from my always awesome local cake shop, they cost me less than £2 for a pack of 30 in assorted sizes. Bargain!
First make your template. Draw your own butterfly or print out the one at the end of this post, cut it out and glue it to some card (eg a cereal box) and cut it out again. Voila: one butterfly template. Use your template to draw & cut out as many butterflies as you want, perhaps whilst tucked up somewhere warm watching your favourite film?
.JPG)
If you wanted to be really fancy, you could print out butterflies in different sizes and have small, medium and large butterflies in your curtain - I of course only thought of this possibility after I'd finished my curtain, but I think it could look rather nice.
Once you've got an assortment of butterflies, start planning your curtain. Spread out the doilies how you'd like them to hang and place the butterflies on and around them. You want to get a nice mix of shapes, sizes and colours and to hang some of the butterflies on their own and some glued to the doilies (you will need two butterflies for this, one on each side). Here are all my pieces spread out on my kitchen counter:
When you're happy with the arrangement, glue all the butterflies to their doilies and then very carefully thread all your pieces together. You need an ordinary sewing needle and a long piece of white thread for this. Knot one end and starting at the bottom of the bottom doily or butterfly, sew 4-8 stitches through each paper piece leaving a small gap between each so they can move easily.
This can be quite fiddly, and it's best to go as slowly as possible and take real care than to get yourself tangled up or tearing the paper - if you're making this with kids you probably ought to do this bit yourself.
This is the butterfly template - double click to view full size and print out. If you print at 100% your butterfly will be the same as mine, just change the % to make smaller or larger butterflies. Please be nice and only use this template for non-commercial use: you can use it for as many fun craft projects as you like and to make gifts for friends but not to make anything which you then sell. Thanks!
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!Enjoyed this free tutorial? Buy me a "coffee" and help support my blog!
Subscribe to my newsletter for a monthly free pattern and visit my crafty tutorial archive for lots more free projects.
Monday, 2 February 2009
Snow!
Seemingly the whole country has had more snow than us today. Here it is mostly trying to snow, rather than properly succeeding. Sort of the snow equivalent of drizzle, or light showers. I am trying not to sulk, and have my fingers crossed for some more...
During one of the small snow flurries I did manage to get a quick snap of my super-simple scarf in action:
Toasty warm!
During one of the small snow flurries I did manage to get a quick snap of my super-simple scarf in action:
Toasty warm!
Sunday, 1 February 2009
Discovering Folksy
I picked up the latest issue of Sew Hip! yesterday...
... and amongst some interesting interviews and cute patterns I was rather pleased to see a feature on Folksy, illustrated by one of my Folksy Makes:
Hopefully there will be lots of new people discovering the joys of Folksy this month!
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Folksy, it's similar to Etsy, a central marketplace made up of "shops" from individual makers. Folksy has "the mission to support craft and design talent through showcasing work and also providing a cost effective platform to sell 'stuff'." I've had a shop on there since they launched and I'm very pleased with it so far and will be gradually adding items as soon as I get things restocked after the madness that was Christmas.
Folksy supports both makers and making, with shop spaces for makers of handmade stuff & designers of limited edition items, crafty competitons on their blog, plus a Making section filled with tutorials for crafters to show off their skills and encourage more people to discover the pleasures of making things by hand. Makes are promoted sitewide but only appear next to listings accessed via search - so if you go to Folksy.com and find an item via search you will see featured makes in the sidebar on the item page, but if someone goes directly to your shop they will only see your items. Oh, and "materials" are allowed too - the sort of things that're known as "supplies" over on Etsy - so you can feed your crafting habit as well as shop for lovely handmade things.
The site launched in July last year and is still in its "beta" phase, which means the site is still in development, so there might not be links in all the right places yet and things are being gradually tweaked and built on and improved... but it also means that the guys running it are very keen on getting feedback about ways the site can be improved, and they've been very quick to fix things and make improvements based on community feedback and suggestions.
It's UK-only at the moment, with everything listed in £s, but sometime soon (later this month I think) the site is going international. There will apparently be an option to list in different currencies, plus a built in currency converter... so as an American seller you could list your items in $s but as a UK shopper I could view everything on the site in £s and not get in a muddle over exchange rates.
All payments within the site are made via Paypal, including your monthly Folksy bill payments - each item costs 20p to list for six months, and commission on anything you sell is 5%. You get three images per listing (automatically cropped to be square) and the search function appears to be based on relevance rather than automatically returning the most recently listed items that mention your search term (as currently happens on Etsy) ... which makes searching for things much less frustrating.
When browsing in categories you can sort items by price or by date listed, but there is no way to "pay to relist" as you can on Etsy so new items are either genuinely new or are being relisted after having been sold. You currently can't make items inactive without paying to relist them afterwards, but there is an easy-to-use holiday mode where everything in your shop remains visible but unable to be checked out - great for weekends when you might be doing craft fairs, or even taking a genuine holiday!
The front page is partly curated, and partly random, and there is a section on the main "buying" page for showing off "new items from new sellers". There are 4 featured sellers a month who are featured sitewide and they are (rather refreshingly) now chosen by their fellow sellers: one of the current featured sellers is picked at random to choose the next lot which I think is a rather nice way of doing things.
Gosh, that all turned into a bit of an essay, didn't it? Well, I hope it was useful to some of you anyway! If you've registered wih Folksy already, how have you found it? Please do feel free to post links to your Folksy shops in the comments for everyone to investigate :)
... and amongst some interesting interviews and cute patterns I was rather pleased to see a feature on Folksy, illustrated by one of my Folksy Makes:
Hopefully there will be lots of new people discovering the joys of Folksy this month!For those of you who are unfamiliar with Folksy, it's similar to Etsy, a central marketplace made up of "shops" from individual makers. Folksy has "the mission to support craft and design talent through showcasing work and also providing a cost effective platform to sell 'stuff'." I've had a shop on there since they launched and I'm very pleased with it so far and will be gradually adding items as soon as I get things restocked after the madness that was Christmas.
Folksy supports both makers and making, with shop spaces for makers of handmade stuff & designers of limited edition items, crafty competitons on their blog, plus a Making section filled with tutorials for crafters to show off their skills and encourage more people to discover the pleasures of making things by hand. Makes are promoted sitewide but only appear next to listings accessed via search - so if you go to Folksy.com and find an item via search you will see featured makes in the sidebar on the item page, but if someone goes directly to your shop they will only see your items. Oh, and "materials" are allowed too - the sort of things that're known as "supplies" over on Etsy - so you can feed your crafting habit as well as shop for lovely handmade things.
The site launched in July last year and is still in its "beta" phase, which means the site is still in development, so there might not be links in all the right places yet and things are being gradually tweaked and built on and improved... but it also means that the guys running it are very keen on getting feedback about ways the site can be improved, and they've been very quick to fix things and make improvements based on community feedback and suggestions.
It's UK-only at the moment, with everything listed in £s, but sometime soon (later this month I think) the site is going international. There will apparently be an option to list in different currencies, plus a built in currency converter... so as an American seller you could list your items in $s but as a UK shopper I could view everything on the site in £s and not get in a muddle over exchange rates.
All payments within the site are made via Paypal, including your monthly Folksy bill payments - each item costs 20p to list for six months, and commission on anything you sell is 5%. You get three images per listing (automatically cropped to be square) and the search function appears to be based on relevance rather than automatically returning the most recently listed items that mention your search term (as currently happens on Etsy) ... which makes searching for things much less frustrating.
When browsing in categories you can sort items by price or by date listed, but there is no way to "pay to relist" as you can on Etsy so new items are either genuinely new or are being relisted after having been sold. You currently can't make items inactive without paying to relist them afterwards, but there is an easy-to-use holiday mode where everything in your shop remains visible but unable to be checked out - great for weekends when you might be doing craft fairs, or even taking a genuine holiday!
The front page is partly curated, and partly random, and there is a section on the main "buying" page for showing off "new items from new sellers". There are 4 featured sellers a month who are featured sitewide and they are (rather refreshingly) now chosen by their fellow sellers: one of the current featured sellers is picked at random to choose the next lot which I think is a rather nice way of doing things.
Gosh, that all turned into a bit of an essay, didn't it? Well, I hope it was useful to some of you anyway! If you've registered wih Folksy already, how have you found it? Please do feel free to post links to your Folksy shops in the comments for everyone to investigate :)
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