Lots of Fabulous Felt Bundles!

One of my big projects this week has been turning a pile of wool blend felt squares into some lovely colour-themed felt packs.

The felt delivery arrived on Monday, I sorted them into colour order on Tuesday, wrapped them all up neatly with ribbon on Thursday, then got them photographed and in my shop yesterday - hurrah!

The Soft Pastels pack includes 12 pretty pale and pastel shades:

Then there's Pinks & Purples...

... Blues & Greens...

... and Fire Tones (thus named because Reds, Oranges, Yellows, & Peach/Coral Pinks was just too much of a mouthful!).

If you want a wider mix of colours, you can choose from the Bright Rainbow...

... and the Bold Rainbow, which has much deeper, richer tones though I'm not sure I've fully captured the difference between these packs in these photos! I think I may need to take a photo of the two rainbow packs together for really clear comparison. *Adds that to the To Do list*

I've also put together a pack of squares inspired by the British coast, which I'm calling Coastal Walk:

Then the last pack is Useful Neutrals, which is currently only 10 squares (unlike the other packs which all have 12) because my stockist is out of stock of white and ivory felt and I'm planning on adding those to this bundle as soon as I can get hold of some.

As well as the felt bundles, I've also added a few new crafty supplies to the shop this week. It's been a fun challenge working out the best ways to photograph everything!

There are lots of different buttons...

 

 

... some lovely metallic pencils...

... and vanishing fabric marker pens. I use one of these pens regularly in my projects, especially when I'm working with felt and want a guide line for something like a cute smiley face. If I mention an "air-erasable pen" in a tutorial, this is the kind of pen I mean! Some pens in this style only write well on fabric but this felt-tip-style pen is great for fabric and felt, I highly recommend it.

I've also added some gorgeous 15mm wide rainbow ribbon to the shop - the 6mm ribbon was proving so popular I thought I'd get some of this in, too. I'm now selling both ribbons by the metre or in 10 metre reels.

Finally, one of the other tasks I ticked off this week was buying some packaging to use when posting my shop orders. I bought envelopes, etc, of course, but I also stocked up on pretty stripey paper bags. They're so lovely I've popped some in the shop. They're available in blue or sunny yellow, and I'm selling them in bundles ranging from 10 to 100 bags.

As I've mentioned before, my shop is currently set up just to accept orders within the UK because of the effect COVID-19 is having on the post. However, if you're based elsewhere and are happy to wait for your order to arrive, please do get in touch and I can give you a quote for postage and sort the payment out via Paypal.

Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With... Washi Tape!

This Christmas my gift wrapping was all about decorative tape!   

 

 

 

It's so easy to add simple stripes of washi or glitter tape to plain parcels, and the effect is fantastic. I wrapped all my gifts with brown paper then decorated them with lines of pretty tape: narrow but super sparkly glitter tape, and a trio of green and pink tapes with festive woodland designs on them.

I'd really recommend this as an easy way to wrap special gifts, whatever the occasion. Just choose tape in appropriate colours and designs and get sticking. Everyone was a lot more impressed with the results than my level of effort really deserved!

The glitter tape looked really fabulous against the plain brown parcel paper.

Top tip: if you're adding stripes to the centre of a parcel, start with the line that's in the very centre then work outwards.

Try to keep your lines evenly space and if you're adding two overlapping sets of stripes make sure to take extra care that you're sticking the colours in the same order each time. I wrapped these gifts quite late one night and didn't pay enough attention to the colours and was super annoyed when I realised my mistake.

Of course, this is one of those things where really no-one will notice you've made a mistake unless you point it out to them but if you're a crafty perfectionist like me it will get on your nerves!

The gifts I wrapped with the pretty woodland tape were much more subtle than all that colourful glitter (everything is more subtle than glitter, isn't it?)  but the finished effect was still very lovely.

As you can see I used six stripes per parcel, varying the position of the stripes to give each package a slightly different look. 

I didn't get a chance to take close-up pics of these so you can see just how pretty that tape looked because my camera battery died about 30 seconds after taking the photos in this post... but here's a card I made using tape from the same range. Isn't it charming?

Click here for lots of ideas for making simple cards with washi tape (this post was originally designed as a Christmas crafting post, but if you use non-Christmassy tape I think these card designs would work all year round), or visit my tutorial archive for lots more card-making and gift wrapping ideas.

How To: Simple Stripy Scrap Cards

A couple of years ago I'd been thinking about making paper flowers for my sister's wedding. She ended up going in a different direction with her decor, so the crepe paper colour swatch I'd bought went in a drawer and sat there unused... until now!

I have no plans to order more crepe paper any time soon, so when I re-discovered the swatch this week I decided to chop up the samples and use them to make some colourful, stripy cards:

Aren't those colours just gorgeous? Ah, bright colour makes me so happy.

The texture of the crepe paper is also rather wonderful.

Making your own striped cards is a quick and easy crafty project, and a great way to make use of any delicious scraps of colour in your paper stash.

Okay so you probably won't have a crepe paper colour swatch sitting in a drawer, like I did, but if your crafty stash is anything like mine you've probably got lots of colourful paper scraps which you've kept because they're too nice to just throw away.

To make the cards: 

Cut your scraps to an even width (mine are about 5.5 cm across), then cut them into sections of differing heights (I cut mine between 1-3 cm). I used a pencil and a ruler to make sure all my rectangles were straight and neat, drawing the lines on the back of the paper.

Arrange the scraps on white card blanks, with a mix of colours and sizes.

I made some tall stripy cards...

.... a stripy postcard...

... and some mini stripy cards to send with my parcels (using up some scrap bits of white card in the process, hurrah!). Add a hole and a piece of coordinating twine and these would make great gift tags.

Once you're happy with the arrangement of your scraps, stick them in place with double-sided sticky tape or a glue stick. I used tape to stick mine, it's less messy than using glue and I was also worried that pressing the glue stick along the flexible crepe paper would stretch and distort it. Whatever method you chose, line up your rectangles neatly and press them down firmly.

On the mini cards, I cut the cards to be slightly narrower than the paper scraps (5 cm wide) so the paper went up to and over the edges. If you like this look, once you've stuck the paper in place turn the cards over and trim the excess paper with scissors for a lovely neat finish.

So simple, so stripy, so good.

I can't wait to send these little stripy bursts of colour!
 
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#Crafting365 Days 16-23: Yarn Experiments, Festive Embroidery & Making Envelopes

Time for another #Crafting365 round-up!

It's slightly scary how quickly these photos are mounting up - but, of course, that's the whole point of this challenge, isn't it? The days zip by so fast and it's all too easy to let days and weeks go by without making space for creativity. But if you do make a bit of time each day to get your craft on it's amazing how much you can get done as the weeks roll by.

Day 16 was all about yarn. I did some more blanket square knitting (my current go-to project at the end of a long day) and had fun experimenting with leftover yarn scraps from previous projects. I love these colourful stripes!

On day 17, I looked in my box of "in progress" projects (a.k.a. a big box of half-finished stuff that has lain undisturbed for weeks, months and in a few cases years) to choose some projects to re-start. It was great to get this embroidered snowman finally finished about a year after starting it! If you want to stitch your own snowman, you'll find the pattern here.

On days 18 and 19, I worked on my floral cushion. The pale green thread in this photo is the thread I'm using to tack the felt flowers in place. They get pinned, then tacked with a few large stitches, then I remove the tacking threads once I've whip stitched the shape in position.

Here's how the cushion looked by the end of day 19:

I've now stitched flowers in each colour, and used up all the shapes I cut out at the start of my 365 challenge... but, as you can see, there's lots of space still to fill! So, I'll be cutting out a whole bunch more flowers soon.

Day 20 involved more simple knitting. I'm continuing to re-knit the wrong-sized squares for my happy rainbow blanket. The squares I made from this pink yarn were so big that I've got enough yarn left over from each re-knitted square to make a mini moss stitch square to add to my patchwork blanket. Knitting the moss stitch squares made a nice change from the endless knit knit knit of garter stitch!

On day 21, I stitched some more of the festive embroidery patterns I drew last year: a penguin and a Christmas pudding. These stitched motifs are going to become Christmas ornaments - fingers crossed they won't take me another year to complete.

I finished a letter to a friend on day 22 but realised I didn't have any envelopes, so I got out my scissors and made one:

I love making envelopes from magazine pages, it's an easy way to jazz up your letters and a great way to get another use for a magazine once you've read it. Plus it would be sad to just recycle these beautiful pages! Glossy magazine pages make excellent envelopes, especially now the Royal Mail have those postage stamps that are like stickers - they're much easier to stick to glossy paper than the kind you have to lick! (Those gorgeous autumnal photos = from the October issue of Harper's Bazaar)

Then yesterday (day 23) I did yet more simple-blanket-square-knitting, and got my paints out to test out some ideas for a new project. So much yummy colour...

Making Stripey Bunting

One of the downsides about blogging about your craft projects is that as well as having a record of all the stuff you've made, you also have a record of all the stuff you never finished and just how long ago it was that you last picked up the thread / yarn / fabric etc and worked on that project that you were definitely going to finish that weekend / that month / by the end of the year. Time, it flies and WIPs they gather dust.

I've got quite a few projects in progress at the moment but most of them involve a bit more brainpower than I've had in the evenings lately. I've been crashing in front of the TV each evening but have still found myself wanting something really simple to work on to keep my hands busy. After years of crafting while watching the telly it just feels weird not doing so!

So I had a look in my WIP stash and dug out these old stripey fabric panels I made back when I was still at school and which I last blogged about TWO YEARS AGO (argh) ... when I was totally going to use them to make something new but instead just put them back in the box they came from and did nothing with them. Tsk tsk.

It's not even as if I'd not decided what I was going to use them for! Thanks to a suggestion in the comments I'd decided to chop them up to make some stripey bunting but had then done nothing whatsoever about the chopping or the making.

So... a mere two years later, yesterday I made a paper template and got pinning and cutting and ended up with 10 large stripey triangles (6 blue, 4 pink) and 10 felt triangles to match.

Here are 6 of them:

And here are the leftover scraps - I'll be salvaging some of the beads and other embellishments from these. Waste not want not!

 

I'd thought about folding over the edges of the fabric, then backing them with felt but because of the thickness of some of the stripes (lines of felt, thick cord, etc) that was going to be a bit tricky and would have meant smaller finished triangles and fewer stripes / less detail on each triangle.

So instead I'm just leaving the edges as they are and securing them to the backing felt with blanket stitch. If they fray a bit, so what? 

I'm using embroidery thread for the blanket stitches, which looks rather lovely.

Slowly stitching all these edges is just the sort of sleepy evening task I need at the moment and with a bit of luck I'll have them all finished before another two years roll round.

How to: Ribbon Scrap Card

This week I'm sharing three ideas for making handmade cards!

First up: a stripey card decorated with ribbons...

I don't know about you guys but I often end up with small bits of ribbon and ricrac leftover from my crafty projects and it feels wasteful to just throw them away. Now you can save up those crafty leftovers and make something from them :)

I used lots of shades of blue for my card. You can stick to one colour like I have, or use a range of colours (e.g. reds, oranges & yellows, or pinks & purples), mix and match a few colours or use a whole rainbow of different colours. Make the most of the scraps in your stash!

To make a ribbon card you will need:

- a piece of paper, a ruler, scissors & a pencil
- assorted ribbons, ric rac and other trims in your chosen colours (minimum length: 3.5 inches)
- a matching shade of sewing thread (I used a pale blue)
- white card or a card blank (I used a piece of A5 card, folded in half)
- white felt
- double sided sticky tape
- a needle, pins, sewing scissors


1. Draw a paper template measuring 3 x 4 inches. If you're using a different card size to me, draw a rectangle in the size you need. Cut out the template.

2. Use the template to cut out a piece of white felt. This will be the "base" you'll sew the ribbons to.

3. Choose the ribbons you want to use, trimming the pieces if necessary so they're all slightly wider than the narrowest side of the felt rectangle. Arrange the ribbons on the felt so they're roughly evenly spaced and you have a nice mix of colours. If you're using lots of different colours, you could arrange them in colour order to create a rainbow effect!

4. Pin the ribbons onto the felt. Then use small running stitches to sew each length of ribbon to the felt, removing the pins as you secure each ribbon. I used about 7 or 8 stitches per ribbon.

5. Turn the felt over, and trim the ribbon ends so they're flush with the edge of the felt.

 

The front of the felt should now look something like this:

6. Turn the felt over again and stick lengths of double-sided tape along each edge. Press the tape down firmly so it sticks securely to the felt. You could also use craft glue to stick the felt in place but make sure you test it first with scrap pieces of felt and card to ensure that the felt sticks properly and that the card isn't distorted by the glue.

7. Place the felt on your blank card so you can see where it's going to look best. Then peel off the paper from all the pieces of tape, and carefully stick the felt in position. Press the felt down onto the card and you're done!

If you prefer a slightly messier / less geometric look, here's a similar card I made years ago - a few roughly cut pieces of ribbon sewn onto (and overhanging) a scrap of white fabric, then glued onto a blank white card. Simple but effective :)

Please note: this tutorial is for non-commercial use only. You may borrow one or two photos if you want to blog about my projects but remember to credit me and link back to the original source, and do not reproduce entire tutorials on your site. Thanks!

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