The 100 Day Project 2018: 100 Days of Felt Food

This year's #The100DayProject begins on Tuesday, April 3rd - are you joining in?

The idea of the project is that you pick a creative action, do it every day for a hundred days, and share your progress on Instagram (or elsewhere online) via the main project hashtag and using a unique hashtag for your own project to collect all your pics together.

100 doodles! 100 portraits of cats! 100 photos of flowers! 100 embroidery stitches! 100 paintings of Brutalist architecture! 100 days of potato printing! Small or large, quick or time-consuming, relaxing or challenging, you choose what works for you.

Last year I decided (on a whim and very much at the last minute) to join in for the first time with #100DaysofFeltStuff... and lasted less than a fortnight. It was an amazing thing to be part of, though. I connected with so many awesome makers, learned some really important lessons about my perfectionist tendencies (frustrated tears were shed!) and the pieces I stitched ended up being some of my favourite work that year. 

So, I'm trying again this year with the slightly more focused #100DaysofFeltFood.

I've had fun making felt food in the past (including these felt fruit tutorials and last year's felt Jaffa Cake), and I feel like this topic will give me lots of variety without hitting that "oh gosh I could make anything but what???" panic which I suffered quite a bit of last year.
 
I'm hoping with a bit of planning, I can flex my creative muscles without tearing my hair out and make it all the way through the 100 days this time. Fingers crossed!

I'll be sharing daily photos on my Instagram Stories, and posting updates in my main Instagram feed - as well as on Facebook, Twitter and here on my blog. So if you're keen to see what I'm making but don't use Instagram don't worry, you won't be out of the loop.

UPDATE: It looks like the direct links to my hashtagged 100 Day Project pictures aren't working if you're not logged into Instagram, which is rather annoying. If you don't have an Instagram account you'll still be able to follow along with my new project by browsing my main feed here, and you can see most of my designs from last year here.

The 100 Day Project 2017

Have you heard of #The100DayProject?

It's a global art project which anyone, anywhere can take part in.

You choose a creative action, do it every day for 100 days and share the results online. You can read more about the project and how to take part here. This year's project starts tomorrow (April 4th) and I'm joining in for the first time.

It took me a while to choose what I wanted to do for my action: something quick and simple? or something more complicated? Trying something new? or developing existing skills?

In the end I decided to opt for something challenging but flexible: I've decided to do #100DaysOfFeltStuff - recreating one "real world" object in felt each day.

Choosing "stuff" rather than something more specific means I'll have lots of creative freedom and can choose something small and quick on busy days (and bigger, more challenging things on my days off!).

I'm really looking forward to this project: flexing my creative muscles, solving a whole bunch of design problems, and making a daily space for creativity in my schedule. I also can't wait to see everyone else's projects and follow along with the project hashtag on Instagram.

I'll be sharing daily photos on my Instagram Stories, and posting updates in my main Instagram feed - as well as on Facebook, Twitter and here on my blog. So if you're keen to see what I'm making but don't use Instagram don't worry, you won't be out of the loop.

Here's to 100 days of felt-y goodness!

A New Crafty Challenge: 100 Gift Wrapping Ideas

I've started a new project!

I've set myself the challenge of sharing 100 crafty gift wrapping ideas over the coming weeks and months.

I love giving creatively wrapped gifts, and I'm hoping this will be a fun challenge... and something a bit different to my usual projects.

I'm going to start with a simple brown paper parcel each time, sharing the results on my Instagram, Twitter and Facebook under the hashtag #100giftwrappingideas, then I'll be blogging about the ideas in batches of 10 as I work my way up to 100.

I'm not setting myself a time limit to complete the challenge, I'm just gonna go with the creative flow and see what happens.

As you might have guessed, the first idea involves lots of fluffy pompoms!

In the meantime, you can find lots of creative gift wrapping ideas in my archive of free crafty tutorials (scroll down to the bottom of the page, you'll find card and gift wrap ideas below the Christmas tutorials).

How To: DIY Advent Calendar With a Twist!

Please note: this is an advertorial and I received a fee to create a Christmas craft idea for www.tescoliving.com

The lovely people at Tesco Living got in touch a few weeks ago with a fun challenge: could I come up with a twist on their 25 Days of Handmade Christmas advent calendar tutorial?

I do love a crafty challenge!

The original project is a tutorial for making a DIY advent calendar from mini envelopes, mini pegs and a large embroidery hoop - click here for the step-by-step how to. Nice, huh?

 

And here are the materials I used for making my version - including my all time fave craft material: felt (of course!).

 

Wanna see how my advent calendar turned out?

Click here to see my twist on this DIY advent calendar project :)

Kickstarting My Creativity with #Crafting365 (Days 1-2)

About eight years ago I started a project called "Crafting 365" resolving to "do my utmost to do some crafting everyday, and record it here on this blog".

I'd had a busy summer in which I'd neglected my (then quite new) blog and my little Etsy shop and not done much crafting. I missed the happy, satisfying feeling of making stuff. I hoped the challenge would help me make time for my crafty hobbies, help me fill up my shop and generally help me kickstart my creativity.

It totally worked! When I'd finished the project just over a year later (via a few breaks due to domestic disasters like a broken boiler) I'd made soooo much stuff and had a ton of fun doing it.

"You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have", as Maya Angelou said, and all that making bred more making, all the ideas I came up with sparked more ideas. It was awesome.

Sharing my work here on my blog and on Flickr gave me a sense of accountability that kept me going through the year. It also led to some great (and unexpected) opportunities, helped me connect to a whole community of crafty people (many of whom started their own Crafting 365 projects) and got me totally addicted to blogging!

Chatting with some friends recently about how I've been feeling in a bit of a creative rut, I remembered my Crafting 365 project and thought "ah, how wonderful that was!" Then I thought "what's stopping you from doing that again??"  

So... here I am. Starting a new "do something crafty every day for a year, take a photo, share it online" project. This time round I won't be blogging every day. Instead I'll be sharing my daily photos on my Facebook page and on Twitter (#Crafting365), then posting a round-up of all the recent photos here on my blog.

The only rule I'm setting myself is that if I'm working on something I can't show you (e.g. if I'm making a project for a book or magazine) I have to squeeze a bit of non-secret crafting into my day so I have something to share and so deadlines don't totally distract me from my personal projects. "There's no photo today because I'm on a deadline, aaaargh" = not acceptable, even if I just knit two rows of a blanket square before bed :)

Today is day three of my project. On day one, I decided I wanted to make something that was an explosion of summer colour so I drew lots of flower templates and started cutting out lots of felt pieces. I couldn't resist arranging them in rainbow order for the photo...

Then yesterday (day 2) I cut out lots more flowers. Just one more to go then I can start sewing.

I hope you'll enjoy following along with my making over the coming weeks and months! 

Use It or Lose It: A Crafty Challenge for 2015

I've been doing lots of decluttering this year and I've found that one of the hardest things for me to clear out is the stash of random crafty stuff I've kept because "I might be able to make something with that sometime!"

So I've decided that in 2015 I need to either get on and actually make stuff with the supplies in my stash, or admit to myself that I'm never going to use them for anything and just get rid of them.

This will be a slow, ongoing process but I'm hoping to have lots of crafty fun along the way and (fingers crossed) a lot more space in my studio at the end of the year. I'm rather looking forward to the creative challenge of coming up with projects to make with my long-hoarded supplies and I will, of course, be blogging about my progress!

Thanks to taking some time off over Christmas, I've already made a start on my first de-stashing project: making lots of lavender bags.

I'd been keeping two huge bags of dried lavender (harvested from my mother's garden) which was waaaay more lavender than I thought I'd ever need but so lovely and scented and potentially useful that I'd not been able to bring myself to just (gasp!) throw it away.

So when my sister mentioned this Christmas that something she owned had been nibbled by moths, I offered to make her a big batch of lavender sachets to help keep the pesky creatures at bay. It's been a while since I made some lavender sachets to proect my own wardrobe so I'll also be making some for myself.

I'd planned on using some scrappy fabric like an old pillowcase to make the sachets. However, looking through my fabric stash I found an old dress my sister had made many many years ago and then given to me in case I wanted to use the fabric for something...

... it's been sitting untouched for about ten years, it belonged to the sister for whom I'm sewing the lavender sachets, and the print is a pattern of butterflies and moths. Perfect!

As well as using up some long-forgotten-about fabric and a big stash of dried lavender, I'm also using some odds and ends of ribbons (mostly the sort of loops I'd cut out of new dresses and kept because "they might be useful for making something!") to add to the smaller sachets so they can be hung on coathangers.

Three de-stashed birds with one crafty stone = an excellent start to the challenge!