I've gone a bit quiet...

.....as i had a baby!

I'm gonna have to take a step back from the blog for a little bit as my little one is taking up all my time (and i'm loving ever minute of it!).

But i will be back soon. I promise. In the meantime here's a picture of my lovely bundle of cuteness. Hooray!

The big button A!

So a while ago i was a bit of a tease. I posted a couple of photos on here but wouldn't tell you what i was up to. Naughty me.

Well, i was making something for my wonderful husband. It was a surprise so i had to keep it a secret until i had given it to him. But now i have so i can share it with you!

And here it is:

I spent a long time collecting together lots of badges that i liked as well as using lots of lovely bright buttons. I then arranged them, painstakingly, in the large A shape.

It was then just a case of gluing them all down and getting it to a framers. I am so pleased with how it turned out. It's difficult to tell from the photos but it is massive! And my husband loved it too. Hooray!

Damson vodka!

Definitely my favorite of the fruit flavoured alcohols!

Last year was a sad year for the damson, there was none to be had and i couldn't make any vodka. Darn it. This made me sad, although i did manage to get hold of some sloes (but even that was hard going) so i had something to offer at Christmas time (phew).

I had my fingers double crossed that this year would be different. And i was! With the bullace berries that my dad brought over for me he also brought two massive buckets of damsons. Thanks dad!

So i set about straight away making the vodka. Got to give it as long as possible to mature. Yummy.

Bring on Christmas time!

Bullace berry gin.

The other day my dad brought me round a big bag of bullace berries. They are a bit like damsons or sloes and somewhere between the two in size.

Now i had never heard of then before but have done and bit of research and have been told that they are wonderful if made into flavoured gin. So that's what i have done!

I have used the same basic recipe that i use for making sloe gin and damson vodka. To be honest i do it by eye and don't use exact measurements. That way if, after a couple of months, it isn't sweet enough or is too sweet i can add more sugar/alcohol as is required. It also depends on how much fruit i have. I try to put in as much as possible to flavour the alcohol.

 

I have used up all of my demijohns making other flavoured alcohols this year so i had to revert back to the trusty plastic bottle.

They will now go away until Christmas time. I can't wait to find out what it tastes like!

Wool pom poms!

The nights are getting longer and the temperature is dropping. You might be thinking about maybe wearing a hat or scarf for the first time (i cannot wait!). This means that now is the perfect time to start thinking about wooly pom poms!

As you will remember i had a go at making paper pom poms recently and this reminding me how much i like making the wool variety. In fact these were one of the first crafty projects i ever tried when i was little. I remember being in a school play aged 7 or 8 and whenever we had rehearsals my friends and i would spend the time waiting around making hundreds (ok, maybe not hundreds but it felt like it) of pom poms. I have no idea what we did with them but we were like a little sweat shop!

If you'd like to make your own pom poms it's really quite easy. First of all you need to cut two donut shapes out of card.

Then tie your chosen wool around the donuts and knot it together to secure it. You then twist the wool round and round going through the donut shape.

Once you have tied enough wool to fill the hole in the middle tie it off to secure it. Then get another length of wool and while carefully cutting between the pieces of card thread the wool between the card (see the above photo).

You then need to tie that length of wool securely together which means you can carefully remove the card and all the wool will be securely fastened in a pom pom shape. You can then trim the wool you used to tie and it will look like the rest of the pom pom.

Yay! Bright and wooly pom poms, i might be guilty of putting them on everything right now. Do you like pom poms? What would you put them on?

It's nearly that time of year again....

.....no, not Christmas (although i cannot wait for that and it's just around the corner! Woohoo!). I'm actually talking about this year's The Big Knit! Innocent Smoothie works in partnership with Age UK every November which means that for every bottle they sell with a little hat on 25p goes to Age UK. Which is fab!

I love The Big Knit, trying to find those little bottles with their cozy wooly hats. Plus i then always end up putting them on things like the plants around my house!

Every year i say i'm gonna make a few little has and send them off but i never find the time to actually do it. This year i am gonna try my hardest to make at least a couple. If you'd like to get involved you can find out how here. They are now collecting hats so if you do want to make one and send it in now is the time to do it!

At the very least i will be buying a few more little hats, hopefully i'll find a few of the really crazy ones. Some people are so creative and they make amazingly intricate hats. Let me know if you're taking part and have made something cute or if you find a brilliant hat!

New curtains.

When i purchased the Charlie Brown fabric to make the cushions i also came across a pair of vintage curtains. I couldn't let them pass me by now could i!

(I apologise for the darkness of the following photos, it was a very dark and rainy day when i took them and even with the lights on they came out like this. Bleurg).

 

I thought about what i could make with them and after some consideration decided that they would be perfect for making a small pair of curtains. I just had to work out how to make curtains!

Rather than follow a pattern or read instructions i did what i quite often do and made a design up myself. The window i wanted to cover was slightly longer than the curtains so first of all i had to make a band to go at the bottom of each pillowcase/curtain. I went with navy blue.

 

Next i made some tab tops for the other end of the curtain. These were pretty easy i just cut out some rectangles of navy fabric, folded them together and sewed down the long side to make a tube and then turned them inside out. These were then pinned into place and sewed on.

Lastly, i needed to sew up the hole in the pillowcase where the pillow would have gone in. And they were done!

I haven't had a chance to hang them yet so i took some photos of them on a broom handle so i could show you! What do you think? Do you like them? Our home now has two wonderful injections of snoopy and the gang!

Decoupage lampshade.

I have been trying to find a lampshade that i liked to go in the baby's room. It needed to be bright and colourful and fun. I was unfortunately having no luck whatsoever finding something i liked.

Then it suddenly struck me: i have bags and bags of bright and colourful kawaii fabric and the boring lampshade that came with and old lamp i bought a while ago. Bingo! Decoupage.

I have used this technique before to cover jars, but only the once and i haven't really had an opportunity to use it since. But since i already had PVA glue and a brush stashed in a cupboard i made a spur of the moment decision to give this boring white shade a makeover.

It's also a really good way to use up all the scraps of fabric that i have had lying around for ages that are too small to really do anything with but too cute to throw away. Yay!

 

 

You need to really make sure that the fabric is sodden with PVA and then it sticks really easily to the fabric of the lampshade. Then it's just a question of positioning.

 

You may notice on the above picture the fabric overlaps at the top over the lip of the shade. I ignored this until the whole shade was covered and then, while it was still wet, i just went around the inside edge and  cute a nice neat straight line.

 

I made sure that i went over the fabric with lots of glue so that it would all stick properly and give a good finish.

I then left the whole thing to dry overnight, balanced on a bottle of gin! Once it had dried it was nice and smooth and hard. I then gave it another quick coat of PVA to seal it and then left it to dry again on the trusty gin bottle. 

 I am rather pleased with how it's turned out. Plus it now ties in with the baby blanket i'm making for the cot and the large quilt i made a few years ago which is on the day bed in the baby's room. Fab.

Sneaky peak....

I am currently working on a little secret project. I can't tell you what it is yet, but i can show you two taster pics.

Hee hee! I wonder what it will be?

Charlie Brown.

Well hello there! Are you having a good week? I hope so. I have been snuggling down at home as the weather here has been rubbish! I have had a jolly old time though as it has meant that i can get on with making lots of the things i have been itching to start for ages. Yay!

First off, cushions. I need a lot of new cushions for the baby's room as well as the lounge and can never find one's that i like. Since they are so easy to make i bought some vintage fabric and whipped up a few of my own.

I bought some wonderful vibrant Charlie Brown fabric a while ago. I decided upon Charlie Brown as it is my husband's favorite. I also had some vintage Cath Kidston flower fabric (which you will remember from a previous post if you read regularly) which i used for the backing.

They took me about an hour to make and i am so pleased with them. And my husband loved them!

What do you think? Do you make your own home furnishings? If so let me know what you make!