Crafty highlights.

I haven't been able to craft much recently. I'm not sure why though as I've had the time to do at least a small something. I think maybe inspiration and motivation has been lacking and maybe this is due to the time of year and the weather.
I'm an outdoorsy gal and while it's nice to find the odd day where I can hit the craft room and make something it gets really meh when I'm doing it because I can't do anything else.
So I seem to have spent spare moments reading gardening and crafting blogs trying to make plans for 2013 and I thought I'd share some of what I found with you guys.

Leaf castings:- Fairegarden has an amazing tutorial on making leaf castings. I'm going to try this with Hosta and Gunnera leaves next year.

I came across Believe&Inspire while looking for hair ideas for my upcoming holiday. I love the tutorials and I now have some fabulous ideas for my long hair that would otherwise look limp and boring.

Weekend designer has a fantastic free pattern on her blog for this fabulous large tote bag. we can never have too many shopping bags and this one is certainly sturdy enough to be very useable.

 

There! Plenty to be getting on with.
Enjoy!

A bit o xmas ruffle

With no real projects even remotely finished I thought maybe I would recycle some old ones. This is a mas tree ruffle skirt I made last year and looks just as awesome this year :)


Well I've been absent from the blog for a wee while due to a stinkin cold and a cough, lucky for me though I have a caring hubby that happily made sure I was warm, cooked meals and helped with the housework. Hmmmmm or maybe he did all that out of guilt because it was him that passed the bug on to me! Whatever the reason I was veeery grateful lol.

So, I'm all better now and to make myself feel better about not managing to make quite as many xmas cards as I'd hoped I decided to have a go at one of those gorgeous ruffle xmas tree skirts that are all over blogland at the moment.

This is what the finished project looks like:

Ruffles, ruffles everywhere.

Although there are a few mistakes in the skirt overall it looks quite pretty and I'm chuffed with it.

To cheat and make life easier for me (we're all for that huh!) I used our original tree skirt and just attached the ruffles to it.

Erm......what was I thinking?

Cute when we bought it many moons ago but a bit out dated and gruesome now isn't it!
I'd been looking for a new skirt for the last couple of years but couldn't find anything I liked. I know, I know pretty much anything would have to better than the monstrosity above but still.......

I have quite a bit of fabric stashed away that's come from many places including charity shops, giveaways of old showroom fabric, fabric sample books, old curtains and quite a bit from my mum.
I decided to use some quite thick cream fabric and had intended to use the glue gun to attach the ruffles but as usual I changed my plans!
I didn't want the frayed edge look to my ruffles cos I'd just be at them all the time with scissors to neaten them so once I'd cut enough strips for ruffles I hemmed the bottoms and the edges.
Then I figured that as I had the sewing machine out anyways I may as well just sew the ruffles on as well. I may have worked briefly as an overlock machinist and a bar tack machinist but I am no seamstress. I hate pinning stuff and measuring things just isn't in my vocabulary.
So I pleated the ruffles to the skirt base as I went - not something I would recommend. The end result was OK on the bottom layers because that's where the base is widest but once I got to the shorter areas at the neck of the skirt base I made some real whopper mistakes.
Once I'd readjusted though I just added some ties and that was it. In all it took me about 4 hours, it may have been quicker with a glue gun but I suspect I would now be nursing burnt fingers!

Easy Peasy tree skirt.

Thanks for taking a looksee, pop by again soon.