Saturday 31 March 2012

Wooden Wedding Flowers

It occurred to me this morning that I have shared very few of my crafting exploits from my own wedding back in February 2009. I made all of the invites, orders of service, wine glass charms, favours, thank you cards and even the wedding cake (which is an amusing tale that I shall share another time…). The biggest task that I set myself was to do all of the wedding flowers – bride, bridesmaids, buttonholes, table centrepieces and thank you bouquets. I bought thousands of wooden roses and my lounge turned into a workshop for weeks. I loved it and even now, 3 years later, everywhere I go people have our wedding flowers on show in their homes. When I chose to use wooden roses it was due to the time of the year that we were getting married and the fact that I wanted to do them all myself. There was no way I could have done it on my own with real flowers. I hadn’t thought about the fact that they’d last forever but it was a great bonus.

Anyway, here they are…

Katryn’s bridesmaid flowers

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Men’s buttonhole – I made them for the women as well but they had two cream roses

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My flowers

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Centrepieces for the tables named after the Islands of the Outer Hebrides

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Small arrangement for each person at the reception

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I hadn’t expected guests to use them quite like this…

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Thursday 29 March 2012

Construct the perfect Easter egg

As a mathematician, I like the geometry of my craft work to be perfect and have a secret passion for constructions (my pupils may not agree that this is a secret). In addition, tomorrow is the last day of our spring term so I am feeling the urge to embrace Easter a little early. Constructing an Easter egg is a great activity to do with years 7 or 8 but I missed my last lesson with Year 7 this week so I shall share the construction on here instead. I’d love to say that I have the skill to have produced this video but I’ve shamelessly stolen it from YouTube. The construction is done in real time and explains each step as you go along. Why not give it a try and make a perfectly proportioned Easter egg for someone special!

Sunday 25 March 2012

Summer’s here

So, British Summer Time has arrived and my kite is still about 25 hours from completion but I keep moving forward.
I bought Mum a new bench for the garden at the end of the summer last year and finally got around to making her a cushion for it yesterday. I stitched a zip into it and really wish I’d done the same for my beanbag the other week. Ah well, I live and learn. Anyway, here’s the cushion, which is made of the toughest fabric I own…

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Today I managed a four and a quarter session on the kite but it doesn’t look too different from the last time I posted it :¬(

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Sunday 18 March 2012

I love you Nan-nan…

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Saturday 17 March 2012

4153 stitches and 28 hours to go…

I am not going to make my published end of March deadline but at least I’m still making progress. I wish that I could stitch all day tomorrow but I have a church parade to attend, two sets of books to mark, 23 reports to write, cover work to set and some STEP III questions to do. However, I am onto my last page of pattern with this project and am still on track to finish within the 150 hours. This is 121 hours of work…

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During the week I also made Mother’s Day cards for my Mum and David’s Mum. The first is a photo card embellished with recycled bits from cards that I have received whilst the second is a simple stitched flower card as requested by David.

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Happy Mother’s Day to all of you wonderful Mothers and Grandmothers out there…

Sunday 4 March 2012

Hummingbird cushion

My second attempt at making a beaded cushion was much more successful than the first. This was entirely due to transferring the pattern onto tissue paper (rather than using standard plain paper) and stitching through this onto my fabric. The tissue paper was very easy to remove and didn’t put the stiches under any pressure.

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Once the tissue paper was removed I attached four widths of some complementary fabric around the design. I had a few issues with this fabric as it frayed incredibly easily and I had fears that it would tangle my sewing machine but I got there in the end.

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Finally, I backed the cushion with a yellow fabric that matches the flowers in the border and stuffed it nice and plump. I’m thrilled with the result and can’t wait to hand it over as a thirtieth birthday present.

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To accompany the present I made a very quick card…

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