Sunny Sunshine Top

About this time last year, not long after baby D's amazing home birth and with all the energy I was saving by co-sleeping, I had a real rush of "I can do anything" juice (not to mention maternity allowance and being in the middle of the summer hols). One of the books I'd bought to keep up my spirits before she arrived was Cute Crochet for Tiny Tots, and of course I rashly bought all the yarn to make not one, but two pieces of clothing for K, oddly enough, not for D. I'd wanted and promised to make them for ages, got started on the first, and then baby D came out of that newborn phase where they sleep and feed all day and you can do all sorts without them grabbing at you. And after that K started school, so there were school runs to do, homework to supervise, and uniforms to be washed through the dreary winter. So everything went on hold, my creative mojo completely fizzled out and all of these projects got filed to the back of my mind, with a mild worry that K would grow so fast over the next year that she wouldn't fit into anything I'd promised.

Back view - delicious little buttons!

Still, over the last couple of years I've got pretty good at reading patterns, and I could see from the outset that this one at least would scale up for a larger child without too many problems - just some extra yarn would be all that was needed. As to that, it's worked in Rowan Glace and Rowan 4-ply cotton - I believe at least one of those has been discontinued now, which is a real shame. If you know of a good alternative please let me know in the comments!


K has nicknamed it her "Sunny Sunshine Top", which is about right - just look at those yummy ice cream soda buttons! They are Dress It Up buttons from Debbie Cripps. The straps are simply stitched-on ribbons with little crochet flowers on the front.


Things I learnt: Not a whole lot, actually, as this was a really simple project - but I probably should have put more ribbon length on, the bows are a little shorter than I would have liked. It did teach me a fair bit about scaling up patterns, though.

I have a ton of little finishes and the button swap still to write about - bear with me, I'm hoping to get a few more posts done this week, D's naptime permitting.

Quick Upcycled Necklace

It's my sister's birthday lunch today and I don't have a thing to wear. Well, now I have.

Upcycled crochet necklace

This is upcycled from a plastic ring off a scarf which was used to display it in the shop, and an old unmatched earring (its mate is lying around in Germany somewhere, ho hum). I crocheted around the ring with Anchor no 8 and some Guterman rocailles, then converted the earring into a headpin by straightening, cutting and forming a loop to attach it to the crochet. One length of chain later, I have a new necklace.

I got my button swap from Apryl yesterday! I will write a post to do it justice later on, but right now I must dash off and get the girls presentable.

Button Swap Sent

And safely received, so here's what I made for Meridian Ariel (picture-heavy entry, this one):

Almost the whole box...

Can you spot the sneaky peek from the last entry?

Let's see...Stash Goodies: a little jar of vintage black buttons (for Apryl's dolls) and some rather newer Dress It Up stars (for fun). A strip of single buttons in a rainbow from my stash, just cos I felt like it (and it was all getting a bit monochrome at that point). A packet of Dress It Up Tiny Rounds in "Natural" - again, I was thinking of the dolls as it seemed to me the natural woods would look good against the tea-stainy, antiqued fabrics. Ditto the white/cream buttons wired onto the card - they're a mixture of mostly vintage I've found here and there, in as many pairs as possible for eyes. Oh, and there's half a dozen millefiori Fimo buttons I made myself a while back.

I've had this button for ages and never known what to do with it, but it made a great centre for this card. I always wonder what it came from originally...a winter coat, maybe?

A pair of coasters from Kyuuto! Lacy Crochet, using Anchor Perle no 8 in varigated red and Anchor Perle 5 black. The black buttons on this are miniscule, about 4mm across, and had to be stitched on with a beading needle. These, and the tiny rounds and stars above, are all from debbiecripps.co.uk

Stuff I made: Apryl's tweets first thing in the morning are invariably about coffee and since I'm often disturbed in the night by at least one of my girls, they always raise a smile! So my plan was to make a coaster and a coffee cup cosy for those out-and-about cuppas. Except I screwed up - I made the original one, with all those teeny buttons, and put it in the mythical Somewhere Safe to dry after starching. And then forgot where Somewhere Safe was. After ransacking the house I gave up and started over, kicking myself as I didn't have enough teeny buttons to make it the same way. Whaddya know, when I went to put the completed second coaster into the box with everything else...there was the first. So I hope Apryl has two desks or something, hehe.

Big red button on the coffee cup cosy. Again, had this one for ages but always thought it was diamante...turns out it's more like milled or impressed, and a lot more steampunky than I'd thought. The yarn is a chunky burgundy with rainbow flecks I had left over from a hat; nothing more than simple double crochet.

Wrist cuff with fancy button (see main picture above)

This is the one I was most worried about because it's hard to make accessories for people you don't know - if nothing else you don't know their measurements!But this button was crying out to be a gothy-ish closure on something. It fits closely on me and I have fairly big wrists, so here's hoping. It's just made with simple little granny squares in Anchor Perle no 5.

Mint cream buttons

I had fun making these! Neither of us are really pastels people but it takes a LOT of food colouring to make deep colours and I'm not that patient (and doesn't the blue stain your hands for ages!!). I happened to have borrowed my mum's Briar Rose flower cutters a while back and they were the ideal size to make big and little buttons. They're not in the picture with the rest of it because I was still scrabbling around for a box at that point, but as with the little glass jar, the packaging from my last Trufflepiglet order (you must try the Gingerbread Truffles, om nom nom) was just perfect!


Anyway, that was the button swap. Whilst I was doing that I also put a wee gift together for the lovely Victoria of Baby Bean, who has new work lined up - and what better for a new desk than a pretty mug, coaster, cup cosy and some yummy stuff to drink and nibble.

Square coaster in Anchor Perle no 8, varigated blue

Star button detail (I'm getting better with that macro setting, no?)

One last gratuitous button shot from Victoria's coffee cozy. I wonder what this scratched-up vintage button has seen in its life - and where it'll go next!

Big thanks to Kitty Ballistic for organising and everyone at Crafteroo for joining in! If you'd like to see more of the swaps, go here for a list of blog posts.

Swaps Are Great; Recycling Is Good

...but actually, I'm not going to show you anything I've made yet, because I've just finished and it's all photographed ready to be posted to Meridian Ariel tomorrow. At last! We're as tardy as each other, though, so not to worry. I had fun with this one, particularly making the sweeties, and it did force me to focus on some actual making of stuff rather than twiddling about being frustrated.


One of the experiments that went "wrong" which I referred to in my last post was a series of crochet flowers in varigated threads, the pattern for which came from Kyuuto! Japanese Crafts! Lacy Crochet. I wanted to turn them into a bracelet and threaded six onto Stretch Magic, but they just rolled up and it was a bit tight. So I stitched them onto a plain t-shirt for K.

A cheered-up plain t-shirt. Kyuuto!

I've used the same book for something for the button swap, and an additional whoozit for a little gift that's also being posted tomorrow. I have to say I was very intimidated when I first opened the book because the patterns are more or less all diagrammed rather than written out. But a little practice and it seems I can read patterns just as well via diagram as I can when they're instruction-based. I'm pleased about this because it opens up the possibility of working from patterns in other languages.

Anchor no. 8 varigated thread - each flower is about 2ins across

Oh, all right then. Here's a sneaky peek of one of the things I made for the swap. You can't tell what it is but it's a lovely button!

Can you tell what it is yet?

Experimental Dross

You know it says "ponderings and random gibberish" at the top of the blog, here? Yeah...expect a bit more of that at the moment whilst I work through my "what is the point of art"-type thing. It's not exactly a critical meltdown of faculties, more a sense of futility and frustration, really. Bear with me.

I have a monkey mind when it comes to art and craft, as you might have picked up - I get obsessed with something and then drop it once I feel I've either mastered it as far as I need or can't get any further without a significant investment (usually of time, but sometimes of materials or space). My latest "thing" is papercutting - something which is challenging technically (though deceptively simple to get started with in terms of materials), but also demanding for my mindset. See, I make stuff. Stuff that has a purpose, or is decorative for something which has a purpose. I don't like greeting cards - the transience and waste bugs the hell out of me and I'm well-known for not sending Christmas or birthday cards. So I'm left with asking "what is the point of mastering this skill?". I don't art journal. I don't make art for walls. Why not? Well, mostly space constraints and a reaction against twee-ness - a lot of art journalling, with it's garish colours and peppy folk wisdom, just leaves me cold. I don't have faith (yet?) that I can make wall-art which would be saleable - and it has to be, because where, in my two-up-two-down terrace, would I put a ton of wall-art? This blog post by Joe Bagley (another "not formally trained" artist, yay!) is both inspirational and scary as hell. As is Paper Cutting, which is well worth a look at just how far you can push paper as a medium.


So why did I spend hours doing this?

Yes, for fun and practice. Of course. But to get any better, I have to do loads - and get much better at drawing because this is a long way from how far you can go.

And then there's this:


which I finished last night and haven't bothered to back as yet (it's just blutacked to the wall)...technically, yes, there are a few rough corners here and there, but the wonkiness/chubby lines of it is all about my drawing (which I did quickly, in white pencil, before I got too scared), and not understanding exactly how shapes would look once reversed. It's ok: it's a start, I'm learning. There are improvements I could make even to this.

But it takes a long time. And I have clothing to finish for the girls, birth samplers and height charts to stitch. I really should be doing something with the shop. There aren't enough hours in the day or strength in my hands to do everything and the "art" really ought to be back-burnered for a while.

And yet.

I can't seem to fight the drive to make something beautiful.

Out Of The Loop

I feel a bit blindsided by this week, and to be honest, there's no real reason to feel that way. K is back in school for the last leg of Reception, I'm back to working Saturdays after half-term with classes booking up rapidly for September, and we should have a clear run of regular routine for a while. But I have this sense that so many projects and committments are slipping through my fingers, even though I haven't really got a lot going on. I think I probably hang out too much on Pinterest...so many beautiful things whizzing past my eyes, so many projects I want to do that I can't find the time for. My dreams and the idle-cycles of my brain (you know, when you're powering down at night) are really vivid, too. So much colour - and so much frustration that I really don't know how to get this down onto paper. Or any other media, really. The last two weeks are littered with experiments and failed projects. I learn something each time but it's very unstructured and I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere - certainly a long way from having that "voice" that makes you an artist rather than a dabbler.

The drawing challenge is going...spottily, I'd say. I've had a few successes like this:


...but I've found the first week or so's topics ridiculously hard to come up with ideas for. I really don't have "favourite" anything much - no book I could rank as "best ever" (how could I, when I haven't read all the books?), no film that I'd always watch whenever it came on. So even deciding on something to draw before I get the pens out has been hard work and I've let it get away from me. For my recent birthday I bought Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists: 52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun which is, I hope, closer to what I'm looking for. I need to be able to draw so I can do stuff with the drawing, not to have an image on a page (nice as that would be).

The button swap is moving along slowly and I do hope my partner Meridian Ariel will forgive me for being a bit tardy...I finished one piece the night before last but I'm waiting for some teeny-tiny buttons to arrive; I think they may just be the final tweak it needs. I've been distinctly uninspired so far - mostly due to paucity of button stash (which was fixed yesterday as I managed to pick up a nice lot on eBay and some lovelies from Debbie Cripps), but also because...well, I really like Apryl's drawing and I was feeling a bit intimidated! You always want your partner to like what you make but sometimes it's really important to you.


On a final note of feeling totally out of the loop, I've really been neglecting my Etsy shop - for the last year since baby D arrived, really - so I hadn't even noticed there was an "activity" button. I got featured in two treasuries! They are Gingham Summer and Keep It Tidy. I'm so chuffed!


PS This blog is now optimised for mobiles, apparently - let me know how it looks as I don't have one of these fancy phoneamajigs.

No such thing as can't

K: "Mummy, when I grow up I want to be an artist"
Me: "Oh? Why's that, then?"
K: "I just love painting."

For a long time, I've lived by the maxim "There's nothing I can't do, just things I haven't mastered yet". I really do believe that there's nothing you can't learn*. Ok, so I will say "I can't knit" or "I can't run" or "my sewing machine scares the crap out of me" or "I can't draw". But you know, I can. I just haven't been bothered to do so as yet. As time goes on, though, the need to be able to draw is increasing. It's becoming one of those bloody annoying things you have to get round to because you can't fly any higher without that particular skill. I have a major problem with "art for art's sake", mostly because finding the point of art - in my head, at least - requires a whole lot of space and time I don't have, and that's been one of my "not learning to draw right now" hurdles.

I'm aiming to fix - or at least, improve - on this. I can draw. In a very untutored, unsophisticated way, yes, but I can make marks on paper and that's a start. So I'm doing a 30-Day Drawing Challenge along with some of the ladies from Crafteroo (Flickr group here).

Day 2: Favourite Animal

I suck. No two ways about it; I don't know the first thing about drawing. But I'm willing to try, and that makes all the difference.


* Ok, smartass, maybe you can't learn to sing if you're tone deaf or something, but I'm talking about things for which you're physically equipped here. Being mentally equipped - shedding the laziness, the inertia - is a state of mind which most of us are in denial about.

Fidgeting About With Paper

So, I said in my last post that I'd got new knives from Fred Aldous and then kind of trailed off about that because I got side-tracked talking about pens and drawing. As it happens, the knives have been out more than the pens this week. I blame Pinterest, mostly, for showing me lots of pretty butterfly mobiles; and I also ran across two really nice papercutting blogs: Papercuts By Joe and Mr Yen.

Anyway, the butterflies and the papercutting kinda got mashed together in my head, and I needed to make a card for my nan to send along with a nice photo of the girls. Whilst I was having meandering thoughts about the design over a cup of coffee and a sleeping D's head, @funkyhand tweeted about a new CD so I went over for a nosy and uncovered these lovely "Flutterby Flowers" digistamps - perfect for printing on patterned paper and then cutting out. So that's what I did (how much do I LOVE the Internet: from idea to printout in five minutes flat for the grand total of a couple of quid).

Papercut made from Funkyhand's Flutterby Flowers Digistamp template, cut from Papermania Capsule Collection yellow pack

There are quite a few images in the Funkyhand pack which look suitable for cutting, so I look forward to making some more!


This is all very well, I guess, but I wanted to try something more freehand and more three-dimensional without having to use glue or those sticky pad things. I had a go on the card above, but due to poor lighting and being in a bit of a rush I didn't get a decent pic. So I had another go at a semi-cut piece (I have no idea if this has a proper name, I'd love to know!).

Semi-cut freehand prototype - might be nice for a wedding invitation or menu, maybe?

Again, please excuse the quality of the photo here, it has done nothing but rain for weeks and my time to get the lighting right is very limited (mostly by baby D waking up at the most inconvenient moment; I've been trying to blog all week!).

Finally, baby D is enthralled with mobiles at the moment - she's learnt to push her lips out and blow so that someone will do the same and make things flutter around for her. I want to make a big butterfly mobile and to that end I've been punching out a couple of hundred 2ins butterflies from vellum all week - it's going to be lovely when I get chance to sit and sew it all together! I made a quick mock-up last night so I could get an idea of how everything threaded up.


Again, hard to photograph but you get the idea. It's very light - just the updraught from the radiator has it dancing all day. D loves it.


What I've learned so far:

- Boy, do I need to take my time with the cutting. But I'm rapidly improving and I do like the semi-cut style very much.

- Punches and WD40 go together like bacon and maple syrup.


Up next: busy busy bee! It's my birthday next week, hurrah! And I have booked a couple of hours kid-free so I can get the sewing machine out; my order from Gone To Earth has arrived super-quickly (cheers Julia!) so I'm champing at the bit to get sewing. Here are the tutorials for the things I want to make:

Soule Mama's Love In Voile scarf
Bloom & Blossom's Fabric Journal Cover
Biscuits & Jam's Fabric Headbands

And a couple of other things I may get to before next weekend:

Smitten Kitten's Hollow Book Kindle Holder
Very Berry Handmade's Lacy Crochet Bracelet

Oh, and I've signed up for the Crafteroo Button Swap - sign-ups are open til midnight tonight, be quick!

A Tale Of Two Pens

Oh dear, it's been rather a while, hasn't it. The Easter hols were pretty busy and broken-up with various days off school and so our family rhythm was almost completely shot (the arrival of Dragon Age 2 has nothing to do with my lack of crafting, honestly). In a desperate attempt to tidy my craft corner I made myself finish a crochet jacket for D - more of that in another post because I haven't actually blocked and photographed it yet; it's at least a size too big, thankfully. I should really be working on a crochet top for K, and a further top each for both girls, but I've become completely side-tracked by drawing. I've been mucking about with Zentangles for a bit and recently bought The Mandala Book, which K and I have really enjoyed looking at.


My dear baby sister is starting to plan her weddings (her partner is Hindi so they're having both a Western-style and a temple wedding, how cool is that - I get to have two awesome outfits!) - which won't happen for a few years yet, but when did that ever stop people daydreaming? :) And by people, I mean me, hehe. A few weekends ago I picked up a copy of Making magazine, which was the "paper" edition - the front has a glorious papercut on it, a craft I've wanted to try for a while. After some fiddling around with paper and a craft knife when I should have been crocheting, I decided I needed new knives and to that end a parcel from Fred Aldous arrived yesterday (I love Fred's. I've haunted it off and on since I was a student and no matter how they revamp it, it'll always represent magic to me. Also their mail order service is truly awesome).


In the meantime A has been working on illustrations for a story he wrote for K, and I've been thinking about drawing some inspiration from mendhi henna patterns to convert to papercuts. Thusday night we were sitting on the couch together, sketchbooks on laps, whinging about our drawing pens. I have a Pilot Drawing Pen, and he has a Faber-Castell Pitt Brush Pen. Being artists of very little experience, we'd just picked them because we liked them, but they were totally unsuitable for what we were doing. So we swapped - and voila, his illustrations rapidly improved and I actually had the courage to draw something. Drawing has eluded me since I was in school - the fear of getting it wrong and pissing off the old dragon of a teacher has been incredibly strong even though I ditched art at 13. I'd done some searching about for mendhi patterns earlier on in the day, so I put pen to paper and this is what came out.

Just having a go at various techniques - I need to practice my ffffs!

Indian Paisley hand

North African-inspired geometric hand


Indian Floral hand

A more Arabic-influenced style hand

Mostly out of my head hand -
I like the heavy lining which is closer to the North African patterns

A little hand for K - she specifically asked for spirals

What I've learnt so far:

- the right pen can make a lot of difference to my confidence.
- mucking about is a good way to learn (doh - I've always said this for everything else but the ghost of my art teacher wouldn't let me play with drawing!).
- I need to learn a lot more about mendhi patterns and techniques but I think some of the nuts and bolts are in place already.

I am just messing about with these at the moment and no doubt a true mendhi artist would be chuckling about my amateurism, but hey, everyone's got to start somewhere.

Mother's Day with Japanese Style

Google tells me the Japanese for Happy Mother's Day is Haha nohi omedeto. I do hope that's right! There will be a lot of people without mothers or children in Japan today and the devastation hasn't gone away: why not drop the price of a coffee or bunch of flowers into the Japanese Red Cross collecting tin? (warning: PayPal page is mostly in Japanese, ofc).


Now that D is 9mo or so, my Maternity Allowance (since I'm self-employed) is coming to an end. I've been fairly austere with it, but with the last I've treated myself to some new craft books, knowing that my earning power for the next 2-4 years is effectively dead and I won't be able to do this for a while. I'm hoping to do some reviews of these books and had idly planned to do so over the coming weeks; as chance would have it some of them arrived whilst my mum was here on Wednesday. Mum's always been a big crafting influence on me, though we don't have many crafts in common - she is a cake decorator extraordinaire, has no fear of the sewing machine and can knit, omg, none of which I'm any good at (yet. I live in hope). But together we nosied through them and the one which caught both our attention was:

Kyuuto! Japanese Crafts: Lacy Crochet. It mostly caught my attention because, damn, it looks intimidating at first! Not because the projects are particularly difficult, but because you will have to learn to love working from diagrams if you want to make anything. And actually, it's not that hard once you uncross your eyes (perhaps that's just me, I'm still struggling to adjust to new glasses this week!), get familiar with the notation and have a little practice.

What I have found frustrating is something that bugs me about most crochet books from overseas: yarn description. All through this book it's simply referred to as "lace thread". What? That could be anything - it's simply noted in "x grams" and suggests a hook which is 1.75 or 1.8mm. I don't own hooks of that size (can you even buy them in the UK?). Other than that, the instructions are fairly clear. I'm not keen on the layout, I must admit - I prefer to see the photograph of the finished project next to the instructions, not to have to flip through the book. This is an argument I have with a number of books and is by no means unique to this one, though.

I have in my stash a heap of varigated Anchor threads which purport to be a size "8" - again, no idea what that means, really, only that they're finer than Anchor Perle 5 but not as light as six-strand embroidery thread. It's been a bit of a slapdash week so I just grabbed one of my steel hooks that looked vaguely right - a UK old 13, I think, so probably less than 2mm but I'm not sure what - and dove straight into the rose corsage project which Mum rather liked. She chose pinks and blacks, which have come up quite well, I think. I substituted 4mm faceted beads in place of the 5mm wooden ones recommended.

It's certainly fiddly to work at this level, but once you get the knack it's pretty quick. I honestly don't think any of the projects in this book are particularly hard once you've cracked the diagram reading, though they probably won't appeal to everyone. There are rather a lot of doilies - but getting the technique for this kind of work can lead to all sorts of inspirations, I think.


What I learnt from this project: That I'm better than I think I am and that having good stash is both excellent and crucial to off-the-cuff projects (I had brooch pins and beads in already, see). That diagrams definitely have a place for fiddly projects like this, and that they're not that hard to read.


I mentioned last week that Furoshiki: The Art of Gift-wrapping With Fabric is now resident on my shelf: here is another example using a lovely butterfly-printed scarf (from Oasis, if you were wondering), tied around a long box of choccies and a framed pic of my awesome girls. Despite being rated three Sumo wrestlers for difficulty, it wasn't actually very difficult - the instructions and diagrams are very clear. I'd recommend it!


So we're accidentally Japanese-styled this Mother's Day. Well, my gift to my mum is, anyway...K has made me no less than three cards plus one for her dad; a fluffy guinea pig made of card and fun-fur; purchased two fairy cakes from the school stall (one of which she claimed herself, which is better than her friend who apparently ate both!); and a teeny-tiny pot of perfect narcissi. Lovely!

Sekrit Project #4: Patchwork Notebook Decoupage

Yes, I know I've missed out Sekrit Project #3. That's because I started it, then the Winnie costume had to be done, then I suddenly realised I MUST start work on #4 because it was for a birthday. And here it is!

Patchwork Quilt Inspired Decoupaged Notebook

This is a birthday gift for Lou. She and I met many years ago - crumbs, must be 14 or more now - on the Internet, waaaaay before it was cool, via a BBS called Monochrome. We lost touch for various reasons (admittedly mostly my fault as I had a habit of disappearing in a snit when I was younger!) for a long time, and then a mutal friend's wedding turned up the odd fact that we were now living just a couple of towns away from each other, not at opposite ends of the country. Older and wiser, we've rebuilt our friendship - whilst I love my mummy friends dearly and have circles of old uni friends, roleplaying friends, and crafty friends, Lou is one of the few people who seems to overlap in all those areas and more. Her work is similar to what I used to do before having the girls and starting signing, so I really value her for keeping me in touch with the professional, "grown up" world outside of hearth and home - she never makes me feel persona non grata because I don't have a nine-to-five job. Being a stay-at-home or work-from-home mum can be a lonely, sometimes dehumanising business after leaving professional life, even despite my awesome classes. Plus, as human beings go, she's pretty cool ;-)

Anyway, enough gushing and on with the make! I saw Ali at Very Berry's log cabin quilt coin purse some time ago. You know how sometimes you get a little bug in your brain that won't go away til you make something? That purse was a proper itchy bug for me, but I'm terrified of quilting and frankly there's so much crap piled atop my sewing machine I'll be lucky if it doesn't turn into coal sometime soon. I'd been thinking about doing some decoupage for a while and learned it by making Sekrit Projects #1 and #2. Then my brain thought "well, can't you quilt with paper?". Turns out you can - by sewing it together. But I didn't want to do that, I wanted to glue stuff. So I started fiddling about with a log cabin paper patchwork.

Lou is a great writer and recently had a number of articles published in The Guardian and various other places. As I was reading one my eye fell on a Daler-Rowney sketchpad that K had been using. I have a big heap of these and it dawned on me that a writer always needs notebooks, whether to write, jot ideas or simply doodle in. And it's her birthday soon. Notebooks should be pretty. I have black and white...oh yes... monochrome...decoupage papers.

I started a "monochrome" inspiration board on Pinterest, gathering ideas. Lou was posting some interesting typography, so I snaffled some of that too.

Then a new decoupage book arrived in the post and it actually had a pattern for a star-shaped quilt-inspired book cover.

Close-up of the "quilted" star.
These are DoCrafts PaperMania Capsule Collection Papers in Monochrome.

Yeah, you can hear the lego bricks all clicking into place, can't you! I love it when a project comes together like that. I cut out all the pieces for the covers (front and back), and then I went looking for quotes and phrases, as they kept coming up when I searched Pinterest for "black and white". It was so much fun I decided to fill the inside covers and some of the pages at random with funny and inspiring quotes as well as making the outer covers. Here they are:

Inside front cover

Inside back cover

What I learned from this project: it needed more time. Glue and varnish, despite much dampening, really caused the covers to bend and it could have done with at least another overnight's weighting down. And I am yet to get the hang of completely smooth varnishing - I did try sanding but it didn't seem to make much difference; with only two layers of varnish I was a bit nervous of damaging the paper. Perhaps with more layers that will give a better finish - if you can confirm that theory do say so in the comments, I'd be grateful!

Two things remained: a pen (had to be a purple one, and I chose a Pilot Frixion thanks to a recommendation from Flossie Teacakes' blog lately), and some nice wrapping. I've been interested in Furoshiki, the Japanese art of wrapping with cloth rather than paper, for a while and...whaddya know, I recently aquired a book about it. One conveniently purple piece of voile later, here is the finished and wrapped present. Apologies for not such a great pic here - you try taking good snaps when you've a 20lbs baby asleep in a sling on your front!

Furoshiki Wrapped Gift.

So there we go, that's what I've been up to this week since I finished Winnie. Tonight I think I will reclaim the XBox from A (which he has been hogging since I bought him Halo Reach last week just for being wonderful, cos he is) and get on with Dragon Age 2 for a few nights. Then, Sekrit Project #3 needs sanding/gluing and finishing, and a crochet cardigan for D. It never ends...thank goodness.

Winnie The Witch

K's school have combined World Book Day and Red Nose Day this year, meaning you only have to do one day of dressing up etc. This is a good plan as they're so close together, and it gave us plenty of time to let rip with our creative efforts. K is a huge fan of Winnie The Witch, written by Valerie Thomas & Laura Owen and illustrated by Korky Paul; and so am I, for that matter. Korky Paul's attention to detail is something I really admire, and having a familiar character who goes with you from picture books to longer-form stories has been a great help in building K's reading confidence. When you're five with a reading age of nine, it's very hard to find the right books and Winnie has done us proud.


(I wish I could get a bigger image here so you can compare but I don't want to fall foul of copyright and I don't understand "fair use" regulations so please go to Winnie's Official Website to compare our effort to the original illustrations!)

We also went to see the Watershed Theatre production of Winnie just after Christmas - that was amazing, do go and see it if it tours near you! Watershed are really one of those theatre companies it's worth going to see any time, whatever they're doing. A lot of what's aimed at children feels like it's second-rate because "kids won't notice". Well, they do - and I do - and Watershed never skimp on the details.

I was a bit dubious when K first suggested Winnie as her costume because it really is quite complex - I know my sewing skills definitely aren't up to making it from scratch (especially having seen the Watershed-made costumes recently!). Then I remembered her older cousin had given her a bagful of outgrown dance costumes (thank you R!), one of which was blue with a pleated skirt. That was all I needed to get my brain churning on how I could adapt it and add the accessories. Because just as Watershed never skimps on the detail, neither does K. She is a tough task master and a stickler for detail, so it's a good job I'm a slightly obsessive crafting nut, ahem.

Here is her completed costume, and I'm going to describe each step we took in case they're useful for anyone else in the future. I also think it's a great journey piece, pulling together lots of different crafting techniques and ideas. I'm quite proud of what I've managed to do here, and whilst it may be a bit OTT for a school costume to some people, I've really enjoyed it and K's very happy. Which, in the end, is what's important, no?

The completed outfit

Dress Frill
First things first: you'll need a blue dress to cannibalise and pretty much anything will do. Could I get the frill on the dress? Yes, it turns out - 8m of lace later! I got this as an offcut from eBay, it's 14cm wide stretch lace and I just scrunched it as I stitched it to the bottom of the skirt; stitching along the middle of the lace so it flopped over and made a double row of frill. Between the pleats and the weight of the lace it twirls beautifully - an added bonus K was chuffed with!

Dress frill, tights and shoe buckles

Red & Yellow Tights
Next up, those tights. Have you any idea how impossible it is to find red and yellow striped tights? Go on, have a Google. There just aren't any. But having stitched the lace on, I wasn't going to let the seemingly impossible beat me. I batted around various ideas with my mum, like hacking up yellow leggings and stitching them onto red ones; but eventually decided on buying red and white striped tights. These are easily obtainable from costume shops (I got ours via Amazon as the nearest fancy dress place had sold out), and then we painted them with yellow fabric paint. Well, that was quite a job - if you ever need to do it, stuff the tights with plastic bags (turn the bags inside out or you get ink transfer from the print) and make sure you have somewhere you can hang them to dry. And three spare evenings. And an extra pair of hands (I roped in A for this job; thanks love!).

Shoe Buckles
The buckles were a last-minute idea - I'd racked my brains for weeks trying to work out how to come up with blue, gold-buckled pointy shoes which a 5yo could still run around the playground in. Sadly this bit defeated me - if I'd had another week I'd have tried to make a felt overlay, but the weather's so unpredictable it probably wouldn't have been worth it. Last night it occured to me I could still make buckles, though. Cut two yellow rectangles of felt, and two black ones the same size. Now cut out a square from the centre of each yellow square, making sure to line this up with where the shoelaces are. Glue the yellow to the black, pierce holes in the black and thread through the laces, knotting securely behind. Voila, shoe buckles.

Cardigan
Winnie's cardigan is adorned with little pearl buttons - I don't know if Korky Paul did this deliberately or what, but they're actually on the wrong side for a woman's cardigan! Again, you'll need a purple cardigan to cannibalise - go for a big size (this is an 11-12) and you can probably find one on eBay for a quid just as I did. Ditto the buttons; 20-odd 7mm ones here just stitched along the edge.

Pocket Contents
I forgot to check if the cardigan I'd bought had pockets, doh! So I just stitched on a felt one. Winnie often carries a frog around with her - just draw a leg and webbed foot onto green felt and stitch it down to the top of the pocket. She also carries lots of wands and I was a bit worried about this, not wanting to get K into trouble for any poking-with-sticks shenanigans. Then I hit on the idea of black plastic straws - safe and light to carry and not likely to hurt anyone accidentally. I just painted the ends white (in retrospect I would use acrylic paint or a poster paint/PVA mix because just poster paint alone did start to flake off early on).

Red Ribbed Cuffs
This is where we're getting deeply obsessive now, be warned. Winnie's purple cardigan has red cuffs! Good grief. I made these by crocheting as follows (UK instructions):

Ch5. Dc in 3rd ch from hook, dc to end (3 st). Ch1, turn. Dc in back loops only (3 st), ch1, turn, and do this for as long as strip as you need to go around the cuff. Double crocheting in the back loop only gives you the ribbed effect, and was inspired by the trim on the jacket I made for K's monkey. Thanks to Crochet For Bears To Wear for that one.

Wig
This was probably the most difficult part of the outfit, and next time I think I'd look into buying one. It's worked ok, but it's not so easy to keep on (K has been in school for an hour now and I'm guessing it's already been abandoned!). I just used loads of black yarn knotted around a soft stretchy Alice band, then plaited the back and added a wide yellow ribbon a la Winnie.

Hat
A real challenge - you'd think a conical hat would be simple, but no (it probably would have been if I'd made it from card!). A felt cone, reinforced with stiff interfacing and glued together with lots and lots of PVA gives it shape, with a sneaky stitch and some twisting of the end as it dried to give it that devil-may-care trailing end. Then stripes and shapes of felt glued over the top. If I'd been able to excavate my sewing machine, and had time to sew during the day when not baby-wrangling, I'd have cut the stripes out as curves and appliqued everything together. So this is a bit of a bodge job and is held on through stitching to the wig hairband, elastic, and lots of hope.

Finally, we added two long fake-pearl necklaces and bracelets (from Primark, ethical gods forgive me; ideally you want to dig these out from a charity shop or somesuch), and Snazaroo face paints for Winnie's long red nose and black lips. One more thing I'd like to have put with it - an amigurumi cat like the one I made for the Cat Swap last year - Winnie needs her beloved Wilbur. But I remember that took two week's worth of evenings to make. Maybe there'll be one in K's stocking at Christmas.

Abracadabra!

Sekrit Project #2

Hurray, Sekrit Project #2 is also confirmed as safely arrived. So now I can show you our decoupage on a larger scale!


This is a gift for the lovely Dr J's birthday. I've been wanting to make these gorgeous peppermint fondant hearts from the Flossie Teacakes blog for ages, but I know I'd just snarf down the entire batch in one afternoon and regret it, so the majority had to be going out of the house to someone else. When I suggested making them for J's birthday on our way to Hobbycraft for the Spring Ring, K said "It'll need to have a nice box. Can it have butterflies?". Of course I said yes, and floated the idea of a heart-shaped box (not entirely randomly, given the fact that K had attempted to bring Nirvana's In Utero for our road trip music*. She was firmly turned down, since she's only five, but it was rather stuck in my head!). She lobbied hard for a butterfly-shaped box, but we decided it would be more difficult to ship without getting battered to bits.



Our hearts came out a bit paler than the ones on Flossie Teacakes, but that's because I was using liquid food colouring and I'm always wary of it, having made some revolting-looking mistakes in the past. We made about five dozen, I think...I'm not sure how many finally made it over to J's (there were four or five layers in the end), but we managed not to scoff too many! It's a really easy recipe and I'd recommend it as one to do with kids; K was able to handle almost all of it without a great deal of help. Oh, and a big thank you to Gail from Gailmade who sent us some perfect heart-shaped cutters - I must blog the lovely Kindle pouch she made for me as part of the Valentine swap.



As you can see we used the nice gold paint from the previous box to do the inside. On the outside K painted the top and bottom with poster paint - in retrospect I think I would not do this in future and use acrylic instead, because with the thinned glue over the top it was rather wet and suceptible to scratching until it had a number of layers. Also: damned balding brush - with K painting I got busy with cutting out the smaller butterflies and a load of hairs had dried in before I spotted it. I am most unhappy about this, but with time snapping at our heels we figured it was better to leave it than damage our work trying to pick them all off.

K helped me to decide on the layout of the butterflies on the lid, and as ever I think she did a lovely job. Onwards - she has one of her own to do now ("with spots and spotty butterflies!") and I want to make one for my sister to go with her new bedroom decor.



* The entire exchange went something like this:

"K, can you get a CD for the car, please?"

"This one!" (Nirvana's In Utero)

"Oh, dear, perhaps not that one, love, it's got a few naughty words in that aren't suitable for you yet"

"Ok. Is this one suitable?" (Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales)

"Oh yes, that's a lovely one."

"I don't want it, then. THIS is the one for me. It's called Pretty Hate Machine."

*facepalm*

Needless to say, Nine Inch Nails did not accompany us to Hobbycraft that afternoon. We finally settled on The Bangles Greatest Hits...