Make Me

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Project #12 - Newspaper Rose Bouquet

My older sister got married last year, and had the most wonderful wedding day. The venue was the Swan at the Globe in London, and the day had a vintage / 1920s theme. She's got an amazing eye for detail, and is full of creative ideas, so as one of her bridesmaids I got roped into helping her make various things for her wedding day, which was great fun.

For their first anniversary, I wanted to make something myself that would fit in with the traditional first wedding gift of paper. I searched online for ages to find ideas and tutorials, and loved the idea of making a bouquet of paper flowers out of newspaper to give a lovely vintage feel. As it was I struggled to find many tutorials that I thought I'd be able to make without looking too handmade, but found lots of photos for inspiration.

I didn't take any pictures of the process I used, so will just have to try and explain as best I can!

First of all, this is what you'll need to make these flowers:

- a newspaper

- some florist wire - I asked in our local florist and was given some for free

- sellotape or florists tape - the latter is green in colour and neater looking, but you can get away with plain sellotape and just cover it over at the end

- some PVA glue - if you want to cover the tape with newspaper at the end

To make the flowers, you need to cut individual petal shapes from the newspaper, in three different sizes. The smallest ones should be about 3-4cm in length, the largest about 8-9cm. The petals are teardrop shaped, you can make them as wide or narrow as you like but I think wider looks more 'rose like'. You can cut a batch in one go from a cluster of pages of the newspaper. Once cut you need to pinch the top and bottom of the petal, making them curve slightly - but keep the three sizes separate.

Next, cut a whole load of small pieces of sellotape. You'll use these to hold the petals in place.

To attach the first petal, and make sure that you don't have a spiky bit of wire poking out, you should pierce the petal near the base and fold the wire down back on itself to hold the petal in place. Then starting with the smallest petals, wrap them around the first petal one at a time, holding them in place with a small piece of sellotape.

Keep adding more petals, moving up to the medium and then the larger petals as you go. When you've got enough petals on, you can either leave the sellotape visible, or cover it with a strip of newspaper wrapped around with PVA glue, to give a neater finish.

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You then simply 'fluff up the petals, starting from the outside, bending them out slightly to give that full bloom look. Easy!

I'll have to be honest, it took me ages, so I ended up with a bouquet of six instead of the planned dozen roses, and my hands were black with newspaper print by the end, but I was really pleased with the result - just a shame I didn't do a great job of capturing them on camera in their full glory!

Posted from Saddleworth, United Kingdom

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April Makes - projects #10 and #11

Despite my lack of blogging recently, I've actually been pretty busy on the making front.

I mentioned in the last post that I'd made myself a couple of tops. Seeing as I made both of these in April and it's now nearly June, they are well overdue a mention. I'm unlikely to get around to a tutorial, so a mention is all they will get!

Both came about when I couldn't quite find what I was looking for in the shops - I sound incredibly old for saying this, but there seems to be a trend towards pretty much see through tops at the moment that I really just can't carry off!

In some ways it's a relief to know that I can attempt to make things myself, to save the hassle of trudging around the shops not finding anything I like. I have found myself looking at things in shops differently now; less willing to pay for things that aren't quite right, unless I think I can alter them to make them perfect.

In this case, my frustration at not being able to find what I wanted led me to do a bit of surreptitious copying to make both of these tops. Armed with some Kwik Sew Tracing Fabric, I sketched around the original top to get a rough shape for the pattern pieces, added some seam allowances and got cutting.

My first attempt was a red tunic top, made from some cotton fabric I'd had sat in the cupboard for months unused. The original top was made of a very light cotton lawn type fabric. Because the red cotton was a heavier weight fabric, I wasn't overly happy with the way it hung, and the keyhole feature on the front didn't quite work, but that hasn't stopped me wearing it.

The second top was a plain white top made with a heavyweight cotton with a slight stretch to it. Again the original I found was almost perfect, but was in a very lightweight (aka see through) fabric. Having had a bit of practice on my first top, and after a couple of stabs at making sleeves the right shape, I thought this one worked quite well. It certainly worked well enough to star in a family photoshoot we did with our little girl at the end of April - the pic at the top of this post is one of the pics from that photoshoot and was by the wonderful Catherine Frawley of Lily & Frank - the pic below is somewhat less impressive and shows the top in its freshly made, not-yet-ironed glory.

Having had a taste of making clothes for myself, I set myself a challenge to make a dress for a friend's wedding in June, and have been working on not one, but two dresses since then which will make up projects ##13 and #14 - with a non-sewing related craft sneaking in at project #12!.

Despite not having finished the dresses yet (the wedding in less than a week away, eek!), I'm pretty proud of these ones, so keep reading!

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Project #9: Easter Egg Decorating

Ok, so I STILL haven't got round to setting the new blog up, and it's been far too long since my last craft post!

It's been a busy few weeks and if I'm honest I've been neglecting the crafting almost as much as I've been neglecting the blog. As I mentioned before, I made myself two tops which I will post soon, but in the meantime I wanted to post a somewhat timely Easter themed project.

I haven't decorated an egg since I was a kid, but to get into the spirit of the season we arranged an egg decorating competition at work, so one night last week I was straight onto Google trying to work out how to blow out an egg to make it hollow. It's actually much harder than you might think!

Making use of my copious scraps collection, I made two eggs - firstly a classy affair made in the style of papier mache but with fabric and PVA glue instead of paper:

The biggest challenge on this one was working out how to hold it without sticking it to myself or anything it went near!

Second up was a character egg, and with some bamboo towelling and mini safety pins in my stash, it had to be a baby egg:

I found the goggly eyes in a craft kit my little girl had been given at a play group (she's far too small to make use of them!), the face was drawn on with marker pen, and the hair was made with some knotted together embroidery thread. I think she's cute and she now sits on my desk at work keeping me company, on a base made with a piece of paper folded into a circle and sellotaped together.

Sadly neither of my creations won the work egg decorating competition, but I was quite pleased with them regardless, and I'll now know how to do it once our little one gets old enough to have to deliver such things to playgroup or school at Easter!

Until that happens however, my next egg will most definitely be made of chocolate...

Posted from Manchester, United Kingdom

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Neglecting the blog

It seems I've been neglecting the blog lately, but never fear, I've not given up on my crafty challenge yet!

The reason for my absence is that I'm shifting the blog over to Wordpress, as I'm getting very frustrated by Posterous. I'm nearly done, but need to get some nicer pictures of my makes so far, as the ones from my iPhone look a little bit sad on the new site, and I just haven't had chance recently.

This does mean I have to find a new name for the blog unfortunately, as someone has already registered 'Make Me' on Wordpress. So all will be revealed soon!

I've been doing lots of crafting in the meantime though, and have been perfecting the art of 'borrowing' patterns from existing clothes.

So, coming soon on the shiny new version of the blog will be posts on projects 9 - 11, with two new tops (for me) and a pressie for someone else (not given it to them yet so lips are sealed until then!).

Bear with me until then!

Posted from Manchester, United Kingdom

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Project #8 - Framed Fabric Pictures

If I'm honest, it's slightly debatable whether this counts as a 'project' as such, it was so quick and simple. But then again, I have challenged myself with making 50 things over 2011 and I'm already two months in so need to get cracking!

I'm still filling our little girl's room with mummy-made decor, and decided to tackle the first (and for a while, only) pictures that I had put up for her.

I always like to credit where I got the inspiration for my projects, as I have to confess I'm not yet quite creative enough with my crafting to come up with all the ideas myself, but I really can't remember where I first saw this. It was one of the many sewing blogs that I read, where a Mum had framed squares of patterned fabric for her baby's room, and it looked great.

Whilst the broad colour scheme in our girl's room is red, I've been using a range of about 8 different red fabric designs to make things in. I have plans to make a quilt using all the different fabrics at some point, but given that will take some preplanning and could take me a while, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to bring together a range of fabrics in one piece.

And it really was so simple to make a tutorial obsolete. I already had an Ikea multi aperture frame with space for 5 pictures. It was as easy as cutting out rectangles of fabric, sticking them to the back of the frame mount so they filled each aperture, and hanging the frame!

Simple!

It's very true that sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. Adding this plus a couple of new purchase to the room has made a huge difference already.

This week's non-craft task is to build a new (or at least new to us, via eBay!) wardrobe which hopefully will get me close to being finished at creating a nursery worth showing off!

Apart from the quilt perhaps. I have a feeling that might end up being project number 50...

Posted from Saddleworth, United Kingdom

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Project #7: Owl cushion toy

I mentioned before that I tend to look at other craft blogs when I'm on the train home from work. Most of these I find through Twitter, where there are some incredibly creative and talented people to be found! This project was no exception, and I credit Twitter user @ninamistry (with a little help from @michellebencsko) with the inspiration for Project #7, which as with the previous project, was created partly to start filling our little girl's room with fun, co-ordinated accessories!

This was the picture that caught my imagination. Aren't they cute?! They reminded me of the Owl bag in 'The Course That Kicked It All Off', which I gave as a Christmas present to one of my nieces in the USA, and I knew I wanted to make a toy version for G, to match her new room.

I hadn't looked for any tutorials on how to make this, so in my usual style decided to wing it, with just Nina's picture to go by. Whilst the shapes involved were very similar to the Owl bag project so I was fairly confident about the general pattern, I wasn't entirely sure how it would work in 3D, so held off from any creative 'interpretation' of the design beyond choosing a selection of red fabrics to make him out of.

First step was to draw and cut out my owl's body shape on a piece of paper, doing this with the paper folded in half lengthways makes sure it is symmetrical. To turn this into the fabric pieces, fold the fabric over at the edge and lie your folded pattern piece so that the fold in the paper matches the fold in the fabric. Pin the paper to the fabric and / or draw around the pattern with chalk or a dissolvable marker. The paper pattern doesn't give you your seam allowances, so just cut 1cm away from the pattern all the way round. If you've drawn around the pattern this gives you a guide to where your seams should be sewn. Repeat this with the fabric you want to use for the back of your owl.

Next you need to cut the oval shape for the owl's chest, using a contrasting fabric. As before, draw yourself a paper pattern to use, so you can check that it fits neatly inside the seam lines on your owl body. We are going to use iron on fusible interfacing to join the two parts together, so start by peeling off one side of the backing from a piece of interfacing and iron this onto the reverse of your chest fabric. You can then draw your pattern onto the paper on the back of this, cut it out and peel off the backing so you can iron it in the right position on your owl's body.

Next up - eyes and beak. I cut all of these from felt fabric and used the same technique as with the chest to fuse these onto the body.

Whilst the interfacing has secured the pieces to the body, to make sure they don't start to become loose, and to add some interest to the design, we're now going to overstitch on both the chest and the eyes. The easiest way to do this is using a darning or free embroidery foot on your machine, which in combination with dropping the feed dogs (the bits of metal that usually pull your fabric through the machine), means you can move the fabric in any direction you want.

There's a great video tutorial on doing free machine embroidery on Threadbanger which is well worth a look, and can explain the technique far better than me!

So, we now have the front of our owl complete with all its features, plus the back, next we need some wings. These are cut from an additional contrasting fabric, sewn with right sides together leeaving the straight edge open, and then turned the right way round ready to be sewn in with the body.

With wrong sides together, pin the front and back of the body together, making sure they match at critical points like the top of the ears. Then slip the wings inside at each side of the body, pinning them in place so that your seam around the body will sew the wings into place.

When sewing the body together, leave yourself around 2" at the centre bottom of your owl, as when you've finished you'll need to turn it inside out and start stuffing it. The easiest way to do this is tear your toy stuffing into small pieces and push it into the furthest extremities of your owl first (i.e. the ears) then add more and more until the body is full.

I hate hate hate hand sewing, but there's no real escaping it for sewing the bottom of your owl up, unfortunately, so I just grin and bear it in the knowledge that it's looking cute already!

I managed to complete this whole project in our little girl's nap time on Sunday, so in less than two hours - despite having to unpick a load of stitches when I realised I'd forgotten the wings, oops! She seems pretty happy with it, and to date (all of 2 days!) hasn't attempted to eat it, throw it in the bath, or use it to wipe her nose with, which for a 17 month old is surely glowing praise?

So thanks Nina and Michelle, and here's to lots more Twitter inspiration...!

Posted from Saddleworth, United Kingdom

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Project #6 - Reverse applique initial pillow

A couple of weeks ago we visited some friends with their new (and utterly gorgeous!) baby, and found myself getting some serious nursery envy when I saw their little one's bedroom. I realised that after putting up some curtains when we first moved in, I had utterly neglected our little girl's room - to the extent that I hadn't even trimmed the blackout lining I had added, which was still sticking out messily from the bottom of the curtains!

Feeling very much like a bad Mummy, I resolved to put this right, took my scissors to the blackout lining, and started to make plans for pretty, co-ordinating crafts I could fill her bedroom with. With my other half on a rare night last Friday, I decided to eschew rubbish TV, squirrel myself upstairs in my craft room (aka the spare bedroom) and get crafting.

I read quite a few craft blogs on my mobile whilst on the train home from work to fill in the time and act as a bit of inspiration, and on Valentine's day had seen a very cute heart pillow on Sew Mama Sew, with a tutorial on Vanessa Christenson's blog. It occurred to me that you could probably use the same technique with any shape, not just a heart, and decided to make our little girl an initial pillow for her bedroom as the first stage in Project Nursery.

So, following Vanessa's tutorial (and her incredibly clever trick for gathering fabric on the sewing machine!), I made G's pillow. And then got carried away and made the fronts for three more pillows, with the rest of G's name on. Four pillows on her sofabed may be a little excessive, but when I get round to finishing the rest of them it will hopefully look super cute!

I'm not overly pleased with the finish on the pillow, and it doesn't look anywhere near as classy and stylish as Vanessa's original one - though maybe that's partly down to taking pics with my iphone? I was particularly pleased however that I was able to make use of left over fabric from other projects - the back was made with the red fabric cut off from G's curtains (so it co-ordinates perfectly, yay!), the front with a stash of unbleached cotton I'd used to make a bag with in one of my first projects (the cupcake bag in 'The Course That Kicked It All Off'). The spotty fabric which makes up the letter was the only 'new' fabric I used.

So step one has been taken, and some day soon I'll be able to post a picture of our little girl's stylish and co-ordinated bedroom, filled with Mummy-made crafts.

Watch this space!

Posted from Saddleworth, United Kingdom

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Project #5 - A Simple Fabric Headband

Finally! I made something for me, not for our little girl! This is the headband I made myself the other night to replace one that I've had for quite literally years, and use every night when taking my make up off.

Ok so it's pretty small as projects go, but I needed it, and it proved to be a great way to turn fabric scraps into something useful. Plus it was super easy to make which is always a bonus! All you need is a piece of scrap fabric at least 2" wide and 8-9" in length, plus a short piece of wide elastic (mine was 1" wide).

So... I started by raiding my scraps bag for a piece of fabric vaguely long and wide enough to be made into a headband. I found a perfect piece from a cute flowery fabric which was actually triangular in shape, so decided to make my headband so that it was slightly wider in the middle than at each end.

First step is to fold the strip of fabric in half lengthways, with the patterned side of the fabric on the inside. Iron the fold so that it stays in place.

Next, fold the fabric in half the other way, so that your fabric is ready to make into a loop. No need to iron this time, just the folded fabric so that you can cut along the length of the fabric on the side which isn't folded to make the shape of your headband.

You can cut it straight so that you end up with a headband which is an even width all the way along, but keep it to at least 1" wide (even if your elastic is narrower than that) otherwise the later steps can prove tricky. Alternatively you can do what I did and cut so that the top of the headband is wider, but again make sure that the ends are at least 1" wide.

Once you've done this hold the fabric up to your head as if you were wearing it, with the centre of the headband at the top of you head, and use your fingers to roughly work out where you need to cut the headband to make it the right length. You need to leave a gap of at least 3-4 inches where the elastic will go on at the bottom. Because I was feeling lazy, and because I knew I would only be wearing this in the bathroom, I cut the ends of my fabric with pinking shears to save fiddling with hemming later. Not as neat but does the job!

Now you're ready to get sewing (and be warned, you're almost done!).

First thing, sew along the full length of the headband, approx 5mm from the cut edge, using a straight stitch in a matching thread. Make sure you backstitch over each end of sewing, as the next step is to turn the headband the right way round, and that can pull on the stitching at the ends.

Personally I hate turning tubes of fabric the right way round again as it's so damn fiddly, but I haven't seen any shortcuts yet so it looks like a case of just getting on with it!

Once you've got the headband the right way round, press it flat with the seam in the middle and on the bottom, so the seam will be on the side against your head when wearing it.

All that's left is to add the elastic. I used 1" wide elastic, and worked out how much I needed by holding it up to my head again and measuring the distance between the ends of the headband. I then measured this length of elastic less half an inch, so that it would need to stretch when I put it on and therefore would stay in place (another inch's worth will be used to overlap with the headband itself).

Poke your elastic inside the fabric at each end and use a pin to secure it, so you have at least half an inch overlap between the elastic and fabric.

Then use your sewing machine (or hand sew if you prefer) to stitch the elastic and fabric together. I did two rows of stitching - one with a zig zag stitch and one with a straight stitch - and overstitched on both as I'm hoping I'll get just as much use out of this homemade headband as I did my old one.

I then very proudly threw out my old, ugly headband and tucked this one inside my make up bag ready for the next morning!

Posted from Saddleworth, United Kingdom

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Pictures from project #4 - tissue box toy

A frustrating evening as far as technology goes - 2 hours later and Posterous STILL won't let me update the photos of my last project, meaning it's missing the essential 'finished item' pic. So here it is, along with a bonus pic of G demonstrating it in use!

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Project #4 - Tissue box toy

The picture above is a regular sight in our household. Not because between us we've had colds and flu for the whole of 2011 so far, but because our little girl G has a favourite game which involves pulling entire packs of tissues or wipes out of their box. She just never seems to tire of it.

So I thought I'd put my fabric stash to good use and make a toy with all the fun (for G), and less of the frustration (for Mum and Dad)!

Stage 1 was easy. I took my stash of fabric and a pair of pinking shears, plonked myself in front of Big Fat Gypsy Weddings (yes, I gave in after my Twitter and Facebook news feeds were rammed with people talking about it!) and chopped up about 15 equally sized squares of fabric.

Next step was a shift up to the sewing room, and using lengths of twill tape, I used a zig zag stitch to sew runs of three squares together, along the diagonal. I didn't make the strings any longer as I didn't want G tangling it around herself and getting hurt. I'm no expert on toy safety but that felt about right to me, you could always just leave the squares separate if you were unsure.

That was the easy bit - now I had to make a tissue box to put them all in! I could have used an existing empty tissue box to stuff the fabric inside (and I'm sure she'd have just as much fun with it that way), but I had a length of heavyweight pink spotted cotton which would be perfect to make a little box from, so here's what I did:

To form the top and bottom of the box I cut two identical sized rectangles of fabric, to roughly the size I wanted, which was about 6 inches by 4 inches. The top piece was cut in half lengthwise down the middle - this is the bit she would be able to pull the fabric through. I then roughly measured the full length around the edge of the rectangles, and cut a long strip of fabric to this length, and about 3 inches high. This would form the sides of my box. Whilst I was using a fairly stiff cotton I added a piece of iron on fusible interfacing to each piece to make sure that the finished box wasn't too floppy.

Taking the two halves of the top of the box, I added bias binding tape to form a neat edge, simply by folding and ironing the bias tape along its length, laying it over the cut edge and sewing straight through both sides at the same time. I wanted the gap that the fabric would be pulled out of to be about 2" in length, so I I placed the two top pieces together and used a zig zag stitch to join them back together over the top of the bias binding, but only stitching a third of the way in from each edge.

With wrong sides together and starting at one corner, I pinned the side strip of fabric along one edge of the top of the box. I then sewed these together with a straight stitch, making sure that the long strip was on the top of the fabric. At the end of the first side I needed to be able to turn the fabric to start sewing the second side. To do this I made sure the needle was down in the fabric, lifted the foot and turned the fabric 90 degrees ready to sew the second edge. With a bit of poking to make sure I was only sewing through the two layers of fabric I wanted I could then put the foot back down and continue along the second edge, repeating the process for the remaining corners.

Now that I was back where I started, I then sewed up along the two ends of the side strip, trimming it a bit afterwards, so I now had half of my box done. Sewing the bottom of the box on was then done in exactly the same way. Because there's a two inch opening in the top of the box you don't need to worry about leaving a gap in your sewing to turn the box the right way out, you just push it through that opening and voila, it's done!

All that remained was to push my pieces of fabric inside the box and present it to my little girl the next morning, in the hope that she would enjoy it more than destroying tissue boxes and packs of wipes! Whilst it took a bit of coaxing at first (and a demonstration from Dad), she took to it like the proverbial duck, and the only fault we can find is that we keep having to push all the fabric back inside!

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Posted from Saddleworth, United Kingdom

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