Paper Towel Roses

We're getting ready for Mother's Day at Toddler Group tomorrow. This week we'll be decorating upcycled toilet roll vases and making paper towel roses. 

There are two types of rose here. The first one has kept us busy with watercolours and pipette painting. We've been dripping watercolours onto kitchen paper and then leaving them to dry all over the house!

Once they're dry we separate the two sheets of paper on each towel and then cut each one in half to form rectangles. You need two rectangles for each rose and they both need to be folded twice to create long, thin rectangles with four layers. Attach one end of one of them to a straw (we used plastic tape) and then keep wrapping. At the end of the first piece I have just carried on with the second (no need to tape together) before using the plastic tape at the base to secure the rose to the straw.

The second type is made from unpainted kitchen towel in the same way and then coloured in using felt-tip pens. They're quite striking.

I have glued cotton pads to the base of the toilet rolls so that the flowers don't fall through the bottom and have covered them in coloured paper ready for the little ones to use stickers to decorate them. Here is the trial one that Jess made...

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…

 

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.

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

Cards sold for Mother’s Day 2010

Rather than crafting this weekend I have continued to organise, creating two photobooks of our 2011 holidays (Texas and Canary Islands) from Truprint as they have a 50% off offer on at the moment and inserting photographs into my journal from our most recent holiday. Whilst sorting out I found some unused photos lying around on an old memory card…

In the first half of 2010 I was busy fundraising with the Zingolo girls to spend a month in Ghana in the summer. One of the many things that they did during this time was to hold a Mother’s Day stall at school. Here are the cards that I made for them:

I’d like to think that my quilled flowers are a little more uniform these days. These ones look particularly sloppy to me!

Past Mother’s Day Cards

I’m having problems with my scanner at the moment so despite having made 40 Mother’s Day cards this year, I can’t show them off yet. However, I did think it was an appropriate time to blog some of the cards I’ve previously made for this occasion.

They may be time consuming but you can’t beat a hand-stitched card. These are all based on designs bought from http://www.stitchingcards.com

It’s an excellent website and 10% of the sale of patterns is donated to an international children’s charity. You receive the patterns instantly in a pdf format that you can print out. You can even sell your cards as long as you use their design copyright labels on them. I’d definitely recommend taking a look.