I was asked if I wanted to participate by the lovely Sarah, who made the beautiful picture you can see in the above photograph.

The idea is now for me to find five people to send on something that I will craft for them. I will of course be blogging my makes, too! The only catch being that all of those people must all find five people too.

That way, we can share the crafting love and hopefully it will be a lot of fun. If you’re a craft blogger this is also a good opportunity to do some fun makes that you can write about. I’m hoping that it will give me the chance to make things I probably wouldn’t make for myself.

I’m still looking for a couple more participants. It is a fairly big ask to commit to making five things, but, as far as I’m aware, there’s no other rules that you need to stick to – for instance, there’s no time limit, no minimum costing, and no limit to what you choose to make.

I will probably be making quite simple things, things that take an evening or less (or maybe more) to complete, so you needn’t feel too daunted by the task.

If you want to get involved – let me know!

So, I’ve been collecting various cushion tutorials that I wanted to try out (most of them can be found on my Pinterest Craft Board). However, I saw this pattern in the Cath Kidston Sew! book and it looked sweet so I decided to give it a go. I really liked the idea of using two different fabrics in one pattern, making it a little bit different from a bog-standard square cushion design. {continues}

Fabric and thread are the only materials you need for this make (plus the cushion insert of course)

The book comes with all the patterns you need to make every project.

As you can probably tell, if you’re any kind of CK fan, that this does not use her fabrics, but I don’t think that matters. Instead, I got my bright blue and yellow from John Lewis and the adorable bird fabric in between from Fancy Moon (this fabric is currently in the sale so if you like it, you might need to act quick). The good thing about this pattern is that you don’t need a lot of the more elaborate fabric for the centre, which tends to be more expensive.

In the end I’m pretty happy with how these have turned out considering I hadn’t made cushion covers before. I’m useless at buttons (for now), so I opted for a design that doesn’t use them – instead using a pillowcase type design. I’m also a bit wussy about zips, so I didn’t want to experiment with those just yet though…. I will tackle both eventually though. {continues}

I used cushions we already had to make these, with one being slightly bigger than the other. I’d love to pretend that was by design, but sadly it wasn’t – I think I underestimated the seam allowance for the first cushion (blue) so I had to use one of our smaller cushions rather than the bigger one it was intended for.

Now is just the small matter of attempting to make all of the other cushions I’ve got my eye on… and figuring out where to put them all once they’re done….

I saw this project and thought it looked like fun, plus the idea of using both a staple and glue gun was pretty exciting – what can I say, I like heavy-duty tools sometimes. {continues}

I love the finished look of this noticeboard, especially the way everyone you make would look different. I used Amy Butler “Passion Lily” fabric, which I found in John Lewis but you can find all over the place.

This was a pretty easy make, if a little fiddly in places – especially creating the holes in the board to place the split paper pins. You’re supposed to cover the pins with self-cover buttons, but quite frankly I liked the look of the pins. Although there’s fabric involved, there’s zero sewing involved, making this a fairly quick make if you get your skates on.

My wall is still pretty empty even with this on, so I’m tempted to make another one in a contrasting fabric to sit above it – after all, that staple gun is just crying out to be used… {continues}

The only slight criticism I have with this is the amounts given in the book for fabric and wadding – it seemed to be far too much than was necessary so now I have extra amounts…. still, that’s never normally a problem in my house as I can use them for another project. If I don’t use the wadding for another noticeboard, I will put it to good use in an oven glove project I have my eye on.

Don’t forget to check out the Cupcake Embroidery Box make, which is also from the Everything Alice book.

I wanted to start off simple and easy, so I chose the cupcake embroidery box to have a go. What’s more, I could make it mostly out of stuff I already had lying about – scraps of  material, card, toy stuffing and felt. The only thing I needed to buy was PVA glue – which I must confess after years of watching Art Attack as a child had always been a little ambition of mine to own a bottle (I was never allowed as a kid, sob) and a pipe cleaner for the stalk of the cherry on top of the cupcake.

The lace around the cake is a scrap from a metre I picked up in a local vintage shop, any type of lace will do though I think – or you could use ribbon or ric rac.

Although it took a little longer than I anticipated, thanks to me going very slowly, this is still something you can easily complete in an afternoon, probably a couple of hours if you’re a bit quicker. This is also the first opportunity I got to use my brand new sewing machine – which I used to stitch up the “icing” on top of the cake, which acts a pincushion, you can easily do this part by hand if you want.

I’m reasonably happy with this attempt, especially as I’m only a little way along in my craft obsession. I’m a little disappointed with how the cherry came out – in the book it was a lot rounder and squashier, but I can always change this at a later date.

So, that’s it, I have a whole bunch of makes I’ve bookmarked, from this book and the others that I receive (I’ll have so much crafted bits and bobs this year that I think everyone I know will be receiving something for their birthday – apologies in advance…) I’m also looking forward to blogging about them soon!

This make is from the Everything Alice: Wonderland Book of Makes.

This is the first year I’ve gone properly Christmas crafting crazy… not really sure if there was any particular reason, though some of the tutorials I saw in last month’s issue of Mollie Makes were a little bit too hard to resist.

Anyway, being the impatient crafter that I am, everything that I made this year can be whipped up in under two hours (by that, I mean two hours each… I’m not supercrafter), so if you want to add some finishing touches to your festive interiors this year, these are all great fun to put together.

Along with each picture, I’ve included links to tutorials or templates, where applicable, as well as some advice for each kind of make.

Merry Christmas, and hopefully Santa will bring you some crafty goodness… I hope he is kind to me this year to make 2012 my “handmade” year.

Felt shapes: reindeer, hearts, gingerbread men

These were the things I saw in Mollie Makes and knew I had to make. It’s simpler than it looks to make something like this – especially as the template is handily provided. All you need is a piece of felt, some stuffing (or if like me you run out, you can use cotton wool or something similar), some thread, buttons and a fair amount of patience for the fiddly bits.

I got the bells for the reindeer from The Works, while the buttons I got from one of my favourite local shops, Claire Grove Buttons in the Castle Arcade in Cardiff. The felt was from Cardiff Market, which had a good selection in stock this year.

Each heart, reindeer or gingerbread man took me around 1 hour or 2 hours to make – the hearts are the longest because of the fiddly button/sequin sewing involved. These could be whipped up a lot quicker if you had a sewing machine – so that’s worth bearing in mind.

These also make great little gift tags if you like to do something a bit special with your wrapping.

Festive food card banners

From this...

To this.

I like banners, and I saw this simple tutorial on The Mollie Makes website. Although the original uses vintage books (and looks fabulous for it), I knew I had an abundance of food photographs lying around from my stash of recipes I’ve collected over the years.

These were simple to put together, and only really require card, whatever you want to decorate it with and ribbon. You can embellish them as much or as little as you like – I used “table confetti”, gold pen, and dots made using a holepunch from spare card.

Maybe next year I’ll have enough festive photos to use my own… that would be extra special. For now, I used pictures from a combination of Olive, Delicious, BBC Good Food and Jamie magazine. Jamie is probably the best because the matte paper reflects the light the least.

If you’re fairly speedy, you could put together one of these banners in about 30-45 minutes, taking a bit longer if you want to be more careful, or add more embellishment.

Oh, one last thing – make sure you photocopy/scan any of the recipes that you want to keep!

Cardboard wreaths

You can see the gold wreath on the photo on the left. The right shows some simple gold cardboard stars, which are scattered throughout the flat for a tiny festive touch.

Looking around the shops, more traditional wreaths are beautiful, but they can be expensive to buy, and they look like they are fairly complicated to make. Taking inspiration from a wooden wreath I saw in a magazine, I “designed” these myself – If you can call arranging circles around a ring “designing”.

I made three for my flat – two gold versions for my windows, and a red and green version for the front door. To make the circles I simply drew around various cylindrical objects in my house (it’s a good idea to keep them all uniform, I think).

I used different types of paper, but other than that left it pretty simple. I used gold card, card covered in foil paper, and card covered in extra fine glitter. Sometimes I think the simplest designs make the most striking and effective.

The gold wreaths look especially effective at night-time when the lights make them sparkle. You could make very miniature versions of these to use as gift tags as well, or if you have any left over when cutting out the circles, you could use them for that purpose.

This is probably the item on this page that will take you the longest to create. The large one did take me around three hours, but the smaller ones only took about 90 mins-two hours. But this is one of those that requires very little concentration that you could stick a Christmas film on mindlessly cut out and stick until it’s done.

Christmas garland banners

I was having a Christmas meal... I don't usually have an 8 seater table blocking up the valuable space in the flat...

These are probably my favourite decorations, and the ones that drew the most admiration. They’re big and they’re bold, so they work best if you have a plain wall with a fairly large expanse to hang them from.

They’re simple to make, if a little fiddly at times. I saw the tutorial on how to make them in Homes and Antiques magazine, but they were also in Sainsbury’s magazine. Basically, you cut out two squares of paper, create a concertina from the paper by folding, attach the two together and fan them out to create a circle.

I used a mixture of red, green and festive paper (if you look closely you can see reindeer and penguins). The red and green I got from another of my favourite local stores, the Pen and Paper in the Royal Arcade… in fact I also used that for the food banners above.

After initially only making one, I thought it looked a little lonely on its own, so I put together a green neighbour for it. Each banner again took a couple of hours, but you can spend even longer on it if you want to add more embellishments and so on. Left over baubles, bells, buttons and ribbon make good additions.

That’s it…. now time to put your feet up and grab a mince pie, or Christmas biscuit perhaps. What have you been making this year?

Wrapping them up in little food gift bags (which can be bought from Lakeland), and tying some curling ribbon around makes it look so sweet, but to top off the twee factor I included these oversized gift tags, downloaded from the amazingly beautiful website Eat, Drink, Chic by Amy Moon, which is one of my favourite crafty blogs out there.

There’s not really much else to say about these other than look at the cute deer! I hope the recipients of the biscuits enjoy eating them as much as I enjoyed preparing and wrapping them… I’m already thinking about what I can make next year… not sure this is healthy.

I’ve not got much else to say about them other than YUM. I may have sampled one (or three) while I was decorating them. You have to make sure you’ve got it right after all…

Also included in this batch are stars and hearts, but it was the Christmas trees, complete with their little baubles that were my favourite.

Here’s a little before picture:

Aside from the decoration, these are pretty standard spiced biscuits, made with lashings of ginger and cinnamon. Dark muscavado sugar is also used to give them that beautiful rich colour.

Hope my colleagues like them.

If you’d like to make biscuits like this, find the recipe on the BBC Good Food website.

They’re very simple to make, and could be knocked together in the quickest of times – which is what characterises my favourite makes. I don’t know about anyone else, but not only am I time poor, but I’m also quite impatient.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s a little tutorial on how to make them…

You will need:
Tissue paper
White card
Black ribbon
Glue

Equipment:
Scissors
Iron (optional)

1. First of all choose a design that you want your baubles to have. Here it was extremely easy because this cute paper from Paperchase was already in circles. You could play it safe with one block colour to tie in with your theme, or perhaps go for traditional Christmas colours.

2. Create lots of circles by glueing the tissue paper to the card, and cutting round the circles (or draw round something circular to create the outline).

3. Take your ribbon and measure it by eye against your door. I originally thought I’d want lots of strands for each door, but in the end I opted for three. Use varying degrees of ribbon thickness to mix it up if you like.

4. You may need to iron flat your circles if the glue has caused the card to bend slightly, as it did mine. Once flat, attach to the ribbon an equal distance apart from each other.

5. That’s it – now you can hang the ribbons from your door, and you have a simple, but what I think is an effective decoration.

So, whenever I make something that I want to photograph (so, that’s, er, most things then), in the back of my mind, I’m thinking about what props I will need to get a nice shot.

For baking, more often that not that’s a pretty teacup, crockery with an interesting design, or, perhaps if I’m playing it “safe”, just a good old plain white plate. This is one of my favourite food photographs, taken in my grandmother’s garden with some 1950s teacups and plates.

I’m always keen to add to my teacup collection… sadly my boyfriend doesn’t share my enthusiasm.

I wanted a blog to put all the things that I make together in one place. So whether that’s crafting something a little bit silly out of felt, knocking together an awesome amount of tapas, or whipping up a little dessert, here is where I will post about it.

It’s also to help me fall back in love with food photography, which I’ve never really given up on, but I’ve strayed away just a little bit from.

Hope you enjoy it… and check out these muffins, which I’ll admit I made a long time none the less. They were delicious.