These are about my favourite thing to make at the moment. 
I bought this beautiful bouquet from this Etsy store a couple of months ago and was hooked. They are even more spectacular in real life than in photograph.
I had a kid-free, weekend crafty night with some friends a while ago and we worked out how to make them ourselves. Perfect to brighten up a dull corner – and they won’t die on you!
This one has been adorning my bookshelf for the last week but is soon to be on it’s way to an unsuspecting lucky recipient…although she might be suspecting now!
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Make It Perfect
These cushions ended up being a little more work than I bargained for. Once they were finished I was really happy with how they turned out, but there were many moments during the making where I found myself asking why I turned something that should have been a quick, easy project into a mountain of work!
The last cushions I made out of regular quilting fabric looked great, but after about 12 months the fabric started to look a little worn and saggy. I didn’t want this to happen to these cushions so I decided to iron on some thin pellon to the back of the fabric to give them a bit more stability.
Then I had this crazy idea to HAND-QUILT around every shape on the cushions. Do you have any idea how long that took?!??
I started out thinking that I would only use the Pop Garden and Bijoux fabric for the fronts of the cushions so that I could save some for other projects, and would use some plain homespun for the backs. Then I realised that it is very rare for the cushions to stay on the couches in our house and that if I was going to the effort to sew them in the first place I may aswell make them reversible so that it didn’t matter which way they ended up on the floor or the couch – they would always look good! A nice, bright change for the loungeroom, lots of cheery colour ready to keep us perky during winter!
There is this dodgy-looking little wood workshop near our house. I had driven by there so many times and never gone in because it looked pretty run down from the outside. I wanted to make some family magnets for my Mother-In-Law for her birthday which was last week and thought that using wooden squares would be a bit better than the tiles I originally worked with which ended up being a bit heavy for the magnets to get a good grip on the fridge.
So I visited The Wood Man. (Not his name, that’s what I call him.) His workshop is so very cool. Heaps and heaps and heaps of hand-crafted and hand-turned wooden bits and pieces. Different shapes, letters, animals, frames and lots more.
The magnets worked out beautifully…except her fridge is covered with some kind of covering which makes it non-magnetic – but I didn’t know that! I’ll get them to take some photos soon…they are in New Zealand.
Then I started thinking of all of the cool things that I could get The Wood Man to make for me.
First up – 10 big wooden Easter eggs.
I thought we would get these made so that Oscar and I could have a painting activity leading up to Easter. But the more I look at them, the more I like them raw. I think we will leave them as is this year and maybe get around to giving them a paint next year.
I also got him to make me 20 x 5cm square wooden blocks. The kids are having fun building all sorts of things with these. I have plans for some fun crafty sessions with them. Will keep you posted!
You may, or may not, remember this fabric purchase awhile back. A couple of nights ago Lil’s Numbers Quilt was completed, washed yesterday, and photographed today.
I hand-quilted it. Truth be told, I don’t know how to machine quilt. I recently bought a new sewing machine and walking-foot to go with it, but I don’t have a huge desire to use it. I really like hand-quilting, I like the puckery-handmade look it gives (when I do it anyway!!) I like my quilts so that they don’t look perfect – I think the generations to come will like the handmade look too. To quilt it, I used a thick DMC perle thread in red and then quilted around all of the red numbers.
Then I quilted a double row of stitching around the pink border.
The green border is actually a 3-D flap that you can lift up. I thought the quilt needed a little bit of extra detail seeing as there isn’t a whole lot of piecing going on.
And the back…to save money and fabric wastage, I used some left-over front fabric to make a strip on the back.
Tick! Another project marked off on my long list of “things to do before the baby is born.” Washing the windows is on the list too…this was more fun!
Today has been like this:
Soup in the slow-cooker, bread in the bread-maker. No more thoughts of dinner for the rest of the day.
Quick clean up.
Out to playgroup. Easter crafts and kids had a fun easter egg hunt.
Home again. Lunch and Lil to bed. Oscar DVD.
Rest of the afternoon….photos, photos, photos!! So many, I had a huge list of things to take photos of. Now to decide what to blog about first…