How To: Wallpaper Snowflake Curtain or Mobile

My plans for ten weeks of Crafty Christmas projects unfortunately had to be abandoned because of my unexpected move, etc this autumn... but I do have a few more festive bits and pieces to share with you this winter!

To start us off, here's a decorating project for the Christmas season - a curtain or mobile of paper "snowflakes" made from wallpaper and silver paper.

This tutorial originally appeared in the winter 2009 issue of UK Handmade, a fab free online magazine celebrating the UK craft scene.

You will need:

- Cups, saucers and other circular objects to use as templates

- Plain textured wallpaper, available from most DIY stores or you might be able to find a bargain roll in a charity shop

- Silver wrapping paper

- Thin cardboard, e.g. from cereal boxes etc

- White knitting yarn and a sharp darning needle

- Scissors, a pencil, and a glue stick or other craft glue

 

1. Using a selection of different sized items from your kitchen cupboards draw lots of circle shapes on the back of your wallpaper and cut them out (the largest circles in my curtain were drawn using a dinner plate). If you’re using a mix of different wallpaper patterns make sure you cut large, medium and small circles from all your patterns so they can be evenly distributed through your display.

2. Take your circle cut outs and glue them to the back of more wallpaper. Leave them to dry, and then cut out again so you’re left with an assortment of double-sided circles.

 

3. Now use cups, saucers and small items like spice jars to draw circles on thin cardboard - e.g. cereal packets and other similar card from your recycling bin. You will need to pierce the card with your darning needle, so make sure it’s not too thick. Aim to make approximately a third of the amount of circles as you made earlier.

4. Cut out all your card circles, and glue them carefully to the back (plain) side of some silver wrapping paper. When they’ve completely dried, cut them out again and repeat this stage so you end up with double-sided silver circles.

5. Spread all your circles out on a large flat surface, like your dining table or a clear bit of carpet, and play around with their arrangement until you’re happy with it. You want to aim for a nice natural-looking mix of circle sizes (and patterns, if you’ve used a selection of wallpaper samples) and for the silver circles to be scattered among the white ones quite evenly.

6. When you’re happy with the arrangement, you can start threading your strands together. Cut a long piece of white yarn for each strand, making sure to include some extra for hanging your curtain, and knot one end. Thread your darning needle, and starting at the bottom circle of the first strand, sew 1-3 large stitches through each circle leaving a small gap between each one so they can spin easily. Repeat this until all your circles are threaded into strands, and use the extra yarn to hang them in your window - tied to a curtain rail/wire or secured with pins.

 

  
To adapt this design into a smaller mobile:

A. Follow steps 1-6 above but use much smaller items for your circle templates and thread all your circles onto four long strands of yarn.

B. Use a dinner plate to cut out a “base” from stiff corrugated card, and cover it with silver paper. Punch four holes in the base with a very sharp pencil, about one inch from the edge and at north, south, east and west on the circle. (Alternatively, you could use the wooden circle from an embroidery hoop as your mobile "base")

C. Thread one of the strands of yarn through one of the holes, make sure the circles are hanging at the height you want them and loop the yarn through the hole several times and tie a knot. Do not cut the yarn at this point! Repeat this for the other three strands.

D. Hold the loose ends together until the card circle is level and the mobile is hanging straight, tie a knot in them (knotting all four together) and use them to hang your mobile wherever you fancy.

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 entire tutorial on your site. Thanks!

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Gift Wrap Ideas #7: Wallpaper

With Christmas just around the corner, I've been wrapping some more presents... this time making use of a roll of leftover wallpaper I bought in a charity shop.

 
The wallpaper I've used is a "paintable textured vinyl", a fantastic combination of super-plain and simple (that crisp white) and really ornate and detailed (the textured pattern). It's especially great for wrapping large boxes - your parcels end up looking a bit like big slabs of Christmas cake! I added some red yarn and a tag for a bit of contrasting colour.

 

I made the tag by sticking some red wrapping paper to a bit of spare card, and then cutting out and applying a small detail of the wallpaper pattern with ordinary prittstick. As the wallpaper is quite thick you can cut out quite intricate patterns without the paper ripping or becoming too fragile to handle.

 

If you've got a bit of time - say, when you're relaxing watching the telly in the evening - you can use this decorative idea for your parcels themselves for a very bespoke look.

 

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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Birthday Shopping part one...

I have been Etsy shopping for my birthday and having sooo much fun doing it. Narrowing down my vast list of favourites and fancied items to a likely list took bloody ages though as there are just so many nice things to choose from!

I have stumbled across the annoying fact of lots of US-based Etsy sellers not shipping abroad though. It drives me a little crazy as an "international" buyer to see US-only shipping, especially as there are very few things that I am enough in love with to go out of my way to email a seller and ask if they could ship to me, please? I want to shake them all and tell them how many sales they could be losing out on! Ah well.

But what have I actually bought? My first bit of shopping was for awesome greetings cards... I always hope that my fave artists will start doing greetings cards or postcards cos I hardly ever buy art for my walls (even less frequently now it has to pass the boyfriend-approval test if it's to be hung anywhere other than the spare room, hehe). I do however believe that you can never have enough nice stationery, and I send an awful lot of letters and bits of crazy post to people. Also cards are a perfect "useful" purchase - and if something is "useful" it is practically a necessity in which case it is almost free, you see.

I still have my eye on some other cards (I intend to continue birthday shopping for weeks - my birthday is still over a week away and then there may even be some birthday money to spend...) but for now I have treated myself to this kickass stash from Askey and The Devil's Wallpaper

I was grinning like a big idiot when those arrived in the post! I am super-pleased with them, and keep getting them out of my stationery box to look at them.

I have been in love with Askey's shoes prints for months. The titles are just darling, too. This one is called "I like your shoes":
Her art is so deliciously crisp and modern whilst still being jam-packed with quirky character. All her prints have a really distinct feel to them, and yet they're so recognisable (to me, at least) as being her illustrations and no-one else's. Oh, and her sense of colour just slays me.

It's great having Askey's cards in a box with the ones from The Devil's Wallpaper (DW for short). It has made me start thinking about how cool it would be to do some kind of UK Etsy sellers collaborative project - maybe a box of Christmas cards with one from each artist? Everyone has such a distinctive style - so much mass-market stuff is so samey, especially when one sort of thing becomes trendy and the same stuff shows up again and again in all the various shops.

It's great seeing artists & crafters being able to make stuff that appeals to them, crazy oddments inspired by their obsessions and interests rather than being forced to tailor-make a neat commercial "range" of similar items. DW's shop is just perfect for this - so many different, awesome things! I really like DW's paintings, but I feel almost unhealthy levels of desire for her paper goods... I want to stroke them, they are just delicious and they are going to help me pretend to be very chic and sophisticated!Her descriptions make me smile every time, too. She is a very funny lady. I've just interviewed Askey for the UK Etsy Sellers blog and DW is the next-but-one interviewee and I can't wait to ask her some questions :)

Crafty Ladies: Meet Kirsty Neale

This week's Crafty Lady is Kirsty Neale of Ginger & George and Hello Clementine.

Kirsty is one of those crafters who seems to have boundless creativity - she comes up with so many different crafty ideas! Her first book Hoop-la! (which I reviewed last year) includes 100 things to make with embroidery hoops, and her new book Paperie contains 100 ideas for paper crafting. 
 

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Hello! I’m Kirsty, and I live in south-east London with my partner and our cat, Albert.

I work full-time as a freelance writer and designer/maker – it’s so much easier saying that online, as people seem to have a better idea of what it involves. Out in the real world, telling people what I do for a living is nearly always followed by blank looks and vague nods!

Recently I’ve been making…

. . . quite a lot less than usual. I’m actually in an odd sort of making-limbo at the moment, which doesn’t happen to me very often.

My second craft book, Paperie was published last month, so I’ve been making some fun promotional-type projects, including a Marimekko-covered stool and some printable origami papers.

My next book is still at the proposal stage though – all planning and research and ideas – so hasn’t involved any actual making yet. I do miss it, but have spent the last two years working pretty much solidly on two books, each filled with 100 projects, so it’s actually been quite nice to have a break.

 

I’ve been working on…

. . . my house. The thing that’s been scratching my creative itch over the last few months is decorating. About five years ago, we were lucky to move into a very neutral, well-decorated house (the previous owners even left us the curtains and sofa!), so there was none of that rush to get rid of dodgy wallpaper or artex ceilings.

Conversely though, it made us quite lazy about injecting any of our own tastes into the place, but we’re now in the process of remedying that. So far, it’s involved lots of Scandinavian-inspired white walls, colourful fabrics, and a few pieces of mid-century furniture.

My favourite things so far are the Mini Moderns wallpaper we used in the dining room, and a couple of Ercol armchairs I picked up on eBay. Making new covers for them is going to be my autumn-evening project, although I have a feeling choosing fabric will be way harder than the actual stitching (oh, decisions!).

 

 

I’ve been blogging about…

. . . twice a month! When I do blog, it’s almost exclusively about the things I’ve been making, so not making as much as usual equals not blogging as much as usual. Apart from some brief randomness about a fox made from vintage neckties, it’s mostly been posts of the hey-I-wrote-a-book variety over the last couple of months.

As well as sharing some project photos, I also wrote a little bit about the ethos behind Paperie, and shared an excerpt on making paper flowers. It’s a tricky balancing act between wanting to share, without giving away too much of the book’s content, but I’m hoping to post a few more ‘inspired by…’ ideas over the next few weeks as a good compromise.

 

 

I’ve been reading…

. . . Screen Printing At Home by Karen Lewis, who is awesome. The book is the perfect combination of inspiration and practical advice . . . sadly, it hasn’t yet fixed the problem of so-many-ideas-I-don’t-know-which-one-to-try-first, but that might just be me.

As far as blog reading goes, I’ve been especially enjoying Austin Kleon and Lisa Congdon over the last couple of months, and I always enjoy catching up with the posts and interviews at Smart Creative Women, too.

While I work, I’ve been listening to…

. . . audiobooks and Radio 4. Although I sometimes crank up the Netflix on a Saturday or Sunday, TV is generally too distracting while I’m working, so I stick to listening instead. If I’m writing, I need silence, but at all other times, iTunes or iPlayer is blethering away in the background.

I love Radio 4 (their comedy especially), and usually have a couple of audiobooks on the go as well. I’m currently about halfway through Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education by Jane Robinson and have just finished Solar by Ian McEwan, which was terrific. I also have a handful of old favourites that I come back to again and again, including a good chunk of PG Wodehouse and some Agatha Christie.

Kirsty’s 3 Top Tips for creating with paper

1. One of the best things about paper, especially if you’re just starting out or curious to try working with it, is the fact it’s so inexpensive you can easily afford to experiment and make mistakes. If you’re working on a new idea or technique, try it out using scraps and leftovers before cutting into the paper you want to use for the finished project. I can’t tell you how many of my published projects started out as a prototype made from missprinted copier paper or last week’s Radio Times!

2. Obviously, paper is a two-dimensional material, but don’t just think of it in terms of flat, decorative projects. Use its flexible nature and often-surprising strength to have a go engineering practical, 3-d pieces, too.

3. If you’re a stitcher, keep your sewing and paper scissors separate, or at least very clearly marked. Few things blunt fabric scissors faster than using them to cut through paper, and it’s so easy to grab the wrong pair by accident. I keep mine hidden away, so no-one else can use them for paper (or – gasp! – hair cutting) either.

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Visit Kirsty's blog, or check out the cute kits and tutorials in her shop. You can also follow her on Twitter and Instagram. 

Click here to read more posts in the Crafty Ladies series.

Please note: the Amazon links in this post are affiliate links.

365 / 90 & 91 - Sweet Treats and a trip to the Dentist

I have returned! Hurrah! Time to catch up on lots of things like uploading photos to this here blog and attending to my daily "find-something-to-give-away" project (fairly hard to do when you're away from your possessions!).

The day before yesterday it rained a lot so I curled up indoors and did lots of sewing...
I finished some poppies, a tea badge and made a few new things as well. I made some little birds for a custom order, a custom fish ornament and then a brooch from the same pattern as I'm so pleased with how it turned out. I had a custom "NOT 50" badge to make and made a spare one without a fixed age ready for personalisation... I also embroidered a few little wood pins, cute little felt log-slices inspired by the embroidery I did for my tree stump.

Here's the NOT 50 badge:
The fish ornament (and its original sketch for comparison!)

Oh and here's a lovely pin tin given to me by my mother - how gorgeous is this??

Then yesterday I felt RUBBISH, just super-tired and generally poorly. I managed to do a bit of sewing in the morning and to get out of the house to go to the dentist (all clear, woohoo!). I felt worse by the afternoon and spent the whole evening in bed eating chocolate (my poor teeth...) feeling sorry for myself. I was feeling particularly grumpy cos I missed out on going to knit night and meeting the wonderful knithappens, which I had been looking forward to so very much. I did at least manage to get some simple sewing done, sewing on brooch backs and finishing off (tasks saved for knit night, sniff!).
I finished off some tea badges and some little acorns ... and in the morning I made jammie dodgers (a suggestion from a lovely customer!) and FINALLY made some more Battenburg pins which have been out of stock for just ages because I am LAZY. They are such fun things to make though, so cute and plump and yummy-looking when they are finished...

... and now I am home again. I have returned home to delicious treats - the boyfriend has clearly been up to no good in my absence as he has bought me presents including this awesome book:
I also had great post from lovely Lisa aka Seaurchin - I bought one of her necklaces (seen on Flickr and just too delicious to resist) and it happened to be her 200th item sold so I got lovely extras in my parcel!
I bought this necklace, made from the patterns in some old anaglypta wallpaper Lisa removed from her house while redecorating... and she sent me another little wallpaper necklace and also a handmade card. The pink stripey stuff in the background is a section of a secondhand scarf that was used for the packaging instead of bubblewrap. Such a great eco-friendly idea, especially if you've got say an old jumper with a hole in it that a charity shop wouldn't take. It lends her parcels such character while the jewellery itself is smartly and professionally packaged in little black boxes tied with ribbon and topped with delicious moo cards.

Lisa's shop is the one on Etsy that I show EVERYONE when I am explaining Etsy to them, no matter what their taste is. She is my example of "awesome and talented specialists making stuff like this..." and her work has received more "ooooh"s in my presence than I can possibly count. I highly recommend buying her work now before she becomes internationally renowned! :)

UPDATE: My poppy design is now available as a sewing pattern! Visit my shop to see all my printable PDF patterns

How To: Wallpaper Snowflakes

Back in October I posted a snap of something I was working on involving cutting out lots of circles...... well, the circles turned into this:A curtain of snowflakes (or oversized Christmas baubles!) made from wallpaper, silver paper and card.

This project was specially designed for the winter edition of UK Handmade - a fantastic little online magazine from the UK crafts scene. You can read the whole issue online here (my project is on page 59).

I've not had a chance to have a proper read yet but there are some lovely festive projects including delicious cupcakes, a stylish floral arrangement for Christmas and (for you felt fans) this completely adorable felt angel from Kirsty of Paperfish:

Ideas for Gift Wrapping

There's something about this time of year, with Christmas beginning to loom on the horizon, that gets me all excited about pretty parcels and making that perfect gift even more perfect with a bit of imaginative wrapping and fancy ribbon.

I'm working on lots of fun new gift-wrapping projects for my own Christmas gifts this year and I'm hoping to share them with you all soon... but in the meantime, here's a quick round-up of my gift wrap projects from last year. Click on the links to find full instructions & more pics.

Pretty paper doilies:
Fake parcels featuring vintage stamps, and cute postage stamp tags:

Brown paper given a touch of luxury with foil cake ribbon:
Faux bois parcels topped with paper oak leaves:

Fun with fonts:

Fancy textured wallpaper:

Sweet and simple paper snowflakes - this would be a great way to get your kids involved in wrapping presents for your family:

Plus - perhaps my favourite project - fun and funky pompoms:

P.S. Fancy more crafty ideas? Subscribe to my newsletter for a monthly free pattern and visit my crafty tutorial archive for lots more free gift wrapping ideas and crafty projects.

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Book Review: The Origami Home

Have you ever tried origami? I loved making origami flowers when I was a teen, and really enjoyed the origami making workshop I attended at the Handmade Fair a couple of years ago so I was delighted when the lovely folks at Jacqui Small sent me a copy of The Origami Home to review.

Jacqui Small publish really beautiful creative books - like Sewing Made Simple, Quilt Love and Made by Yourself. Whenever you see one of their books you just know it's gonna be a lovely object... and The Origami Home is no exception!

It's a gorgeously chunky hardback featuring 30+ miniature pieces of furniture to make from paper.

The book also includes 55 sheets of specially printed papers in fabric and wallpaper designs from the likes of Little Greene and Mini Moderns so you can perfectly recreate the projects in the book.

 

The origami patterns are organised by room, so you can make little room sets to display on a bookshelf (so cute!).

 

There's an introductory section that covers the folding process and the symbols you'll encounter throughout the book.

 

Each chapter begins with a photo of the finished room set, then one by one it takes you through the steps you need to make each piece of furniture. There's a living room, modern-retro dining room, workspace, bathroom, terrace and more.

The step by step diagrams are illustrated with the same patterns as the paper used to make the piece. Although it's helpful to clearly see which is the decorated and which the plain side of the paper when folding, I have to admit that I found the addition of the pattern on top of the fold lines, arrows, etc. shown on the diagram rather distracting.

I'd definitely recommend starting with some of the designs that have been made from plain paper - and thus have less visually cluttered illustrations - so you can really clearly see the instructions while you're getting to grips with the techniques.

The Origami Home would be a great addition to your bookshelf if you have a passion for all things interiors-related, or if you're just interested in origami and want to try making something different to the usual animals and flowers.

The inclusion of the paper pack also makes this an ideal book to give as a gift as you can get crafting straight away!

The Origami Home by Mark Bolitho (chair of the British Origami Society) is published by Jacqui Small. RRP £20. It's available from Amazon, the Book Depository and many other bookshops.

Please note: I was sent a free review copy of this book. The Amazon links in this post are affiliate links.