Turns out i can(dle)

Look what I made.

waxed faffage

Making christening candles is far out of my handmaking comfort zone, and frankly not anything I am the least bit interested in repeating (I don't think. However...)

It seems to me a bit odd and frankly a little grim to burn a picture of your loved one. But convention is as convention does, and I was darned if I was going to pay some other sucker to make the silly thing.

Basically, I went through a range of contortions and tricks to get the photo onto tissue paper, position it on the candle, wrap it in waxed paper, and apply heat. Easier said than done, much ink and wax everywhere.

How this actually works is that the surface of the wax melts, soaks into the tissue and then hardens again. There is no ink transfer as such, and the waxed paper is only there hold the tissue evenly and smoothly against the candle.

I wish one of the many many DIY tutorials I read had explained this, because I spent  a great deal of time searching for waxed paper, and eventually gave in and bought greaseproof on the the offchance.

I know the two are different, and can't often be substituted, but in this case they can. Just so you know...

I'm not entriely convinced it won't go up in a ball of flame if it burns down to the tissue (assuming the ribbon and sticky diamantes don't do the job), but I doubt I'll ever find out (see above: squeamishness as incinerating face of small child).

Happy belated birthday

BoyGoblin turned two not long after The Big Move, and so it was time for another birthday badge. You can see last year's here (and there's a pdf tutorial too).

This year it was all about steam trains.

This works the same as the last one, with a magnet sewn into the frontspiece, and into a large plain felt circle worn inside the clothing. 

A big hard-to-swallow felt circle for the back, with the magnet double-sewn in.

You can see that I had to use oblong magnets this year - round ones work better.

The ribbon really lifts it

The ribbon was a real find - from a bargain store, of all places!

Pun-tastic!

Patient feet

Cosy alpaca toes for the littlest, who also astonished me with his forebearance, allowing mummy to slip his feet in and out of partly completed slippers throughout the hot afternoon. (I think he was actually more tolerant than his mumma.)

Not sure how long these will stay white when goblintoes inhabit them...

 I bought a pattern for the applique alphabet, forgetting that as I'm left-handed, I've had to reverse them all - either working backwards up the pattern, or reverse engineering each letter. 

f is for faff

I've already given up, and all the cousins will be getting stars appliqued on their toes. 

This was a cat-warming gift for a friend

Our should that be a housewarming gift for a cat? Not sure.

How is it that he looks smiley when I didn't give him a mouth?

It’s a simple little handsewn feltie, stuffed with crinkly plastic, and long jumpy legs of ribbon.

Looong legs

His toes and back ridges are embroidered in variegated thread (which I hardly ever see the point of, but it works well here.) and he has little yellow French-knot warts.

Warts never looked so good

He’s dangling on a piece of elastic, and jumps quite nicely I think…

Jumping!

Reggie seems to like him in any case...

Boys don't wash

Not much time for sewing around here at the moment, not least because we’ve been away on holiday.

And every time we go, I’m astonished at how vast our family toiletry / first aid bag is. There are only three of us, one is less than three foot tall, and neither of his mamas are lotions and potions sorts of gals. But we routinely fill a large nappy bag with soap, shampoos, moisturisers, plasters, panadol, thermometers…. You name it! And even that’s with all of us smelling of baby bath all week.

Not only is the resulting saddlebag bulky and heavy, but it makes it very difficult to find anything, like a medicine syringe at 1am.

To divide it up a little more, the BoyGoblin needs his own wetbag. After a couple of days of sketching, reality bit – no time to make one, especially as the skills gap was less a fissure and more a chasm (oilcloth? Zip? Eek!).

A couple of hours online  revealed that buying one was going to be tricky too, as apparently, boy children don’t wash.

So I did a quick and dirty. A £2 toiletry bag from Tiger, and 10 minutes to iron on a set of transfers I picked up in Berlin last year.

Just a sample of the stuff that will ge stuffed in here...

The photos aren’t hugely charismatic, and neither is the bag to be honest, but it does the trick, and as far as boygoblin is concerned its perfect! Not only has it got diggers on it, but you can put things in and take things out. Did I mention the diggers?



Flocked forklift. Flocking awesome!







The end of the rainbow...

I finally finished it. Goodness me.



Juicy colours, made with love, sweat and tears.

I can’t tell you how painful the freemotion quilting was. I’m clearly not a natural (hence the deliberately off-centre swirls) and I had all sorts of issues with my tension (both the thread, and my shoulders.)

Charming wobbly spirals - the much contested limit of my freemotion prowess.

There are four big pockets in the back,  that will loosely hold cars, crayons, whatever.

These are the pockets...



... and these would be the Whatevers. DearWife was not impressed.

It all rolls up neatly.


Oh, and I appliqued some shapes on the back too. Templates via Word, sanity via Bondaweb.



I wonder how long it will take me to sew on a strap?

Like a yummy car-filled sushi roll

 I think the Cath Kidston ribbon I got for my birthday makes perfect binding. Lucky I procrastinated over finishing then, eh?

By far the biggest challenge was met by DearWife, who completed her mission to find a car to match each panel. Pink was a particular challenge.

I can hear the engines revving, can't you?

  This one's going on the plane with us. 

I'm not a papercrafter but...

…I am a thrifty stitcher, which is where the inspiration for this came from.



Sturdy baby bath box about to be repurposed



This was a box of baby samples. It was a free offer, and comes with an inner tray that makes it perfect as a sewing box.

Now, not being a papercrafter (did I mention that) I used some fairly basic materials to  spruce it up a bit



The paper was scrap from a craft magazine, and the rest of the materials are pretty basic



I was rather pleased with this ingenious use of fridge magnets and binding clips (actually hairclips):

 

I'm sure papercrafters have a slicker way...



 I traced the shape of the label i wanted to cover onto baking paper, and then used magnets and hairclips to "pin" the template to the patterned paper.

Et voila!



The teal tray comes out too



And not content to stop there...

This box cost £8

DearWife was not oncvinced when I brought this home...

And with the addition of wrapping paper and felt letters makes a jolly, practical  storage box for boygoblin’s rapidly expanding stash of art and craft supplies.

(like mother, like son…)





Not cranky. Not even a little bit.

Here is the first piece of beading I have tackled in nearly 10 years. The last time I tried to bead, I got so incandescent with rage that my partner confiscated my loom. So. Here we are.

the very very beginning.

This is the start of a simple beaded fringe. Its the subject of a tutorial I wrote for Korbond's Sewing Solutions site.

I might try some more.

Scrap happy

With BoyGoblin now fully mobile and into everything,  everything’s a choke hazard!

To give myself a fighting chance of keeping the sewing room at least a couple of steps away from being a deathtrap, I’ve made a scrap basket to catch quilting trimmings and stray threads.

Fresh spring florals

It hangs on the back of my chair, where the horrible old tesco bag used to sit.

The mouth of the bag is kept open by an embroidery hoop, an idea I cribbed from a laundry bag pattern.    The bag is quilted, which also helps add structure and stiffness. Happily, this also means the bag will sit up on the cutting table quite happily as well.

Pretty and perky

Pleasingly, it’s also made from scraps and oddments. The feature fabric is trimmings from a “Me and My Sister Favourites” jellyroll from Moda, left over from a long running WIP (technically not yet left over, as the blocks haven’t been yet been joined up, but they have been pieced and the border, binding and backing put aside, so I’m quietly (foolishly) confident).

Sneaky peek at work in progress

The buckle, ribbon, and sequins were all fossicked up from various jars of findings.

Dainty buckle

The flowers were simply cut freehand, backed with iron-on interfacing and sewn in place by hand. They are secured in the centre with the embellishments and the petals are left loose.

Juicy blooms

Delicate daisies

Christmas countdown

 

Actually, Christmas started for me about three weeks ago when I dug this out from my WIP bag.

It’s a feltworks kit from Dimensions that I’ve been pecking at for the last couple of years. I think it will take a few more to be honest.

Although I’m up to the fun bit now – these little felt tokens are useless, and fiddly, and some of them are not even that pretty but there is something about them that is oddly satisfying

sparkly!



And I’ve even managed not to leave the floor scattered with beans and sequins (otherwise known as choke hazards). Needless to say, its not quite as portable as my usual handsewing projects...