Bunting!

What a nightmare of a day I had yesterday!

I dragged my poor other half around no less than 8 shops and one market looking for some jubilee bunting - everywhere had sold out! And they reckon people are against the monarchy and don't care about the jubilee?

I was even laughed at by one of the assistants in one of the shops I went into 'we sold out of that the day it came in!' he said as he shuffled off to re-stock the crisps.

After three hours in town (and two horrible blisters later) I came home in a bit of a grump. I wanted to put ups some bunting!

So sod it...I made some!

Now it's not pretty bunting, but I should get some points for effort I think!

I cannot draw, sketch or colour for toffee. I just can't. But in my fit of need for tri-coloured Jubilee decorations I cracked out the crayons and started drawing!

And here are my bunting pieces!



Then I simply popped holes in each corner and strung them up on some wool.



No measuring, no faffing - just crayon drawn flags on card attached to wool. Sorted.

And you know what? I cannot see any other flags or bunting anywhere in my neighbourhood...so who the heck bought it all??

Let's make this house a home! Part 3

Oooh I'm onto part three already! I have no idea how many parts there will be but it makes me happy that I'm continuing to make pretty things for our little flat to make it more 'ours'.

So this blog post is about a garland/bunting thingimawhatsit that I actually made a fair few weeks ago, but just haven't gotten around to blogging about yet!

I've seen lots of people making garlands made from old book pages which I simultaneously love and hate - I love the ideas of using passages from your favourite books, but I couldn't bring myself to destroy a book (or have someone else destroy a book) for the sake of something pretty. Nope. Just can't do it.

So I found this tutorial on making a heart garland from craft paper - woo!

Except...I don't have any craft paper. Drat! And the whole point of making things myself is to not spend too much money so I can't exactly go out and buy any can I?

So I needed to make a solution...ta-da! Light bulb moment! I printed off some pages of text (I don't know about copyright for things like this so they're random pages) and I tea bagged them!

Stop sniggering.

I used cold, soggy tea bags to give the paper a nice antiqued look :) Word of advise...drying on a clothes wrack worked brilliantly! AND the paper is stiffer when you've done this too!




I should have printed double sided text but I forgot so I folded each sheet in half and glued it together with my trusty Pritt Stick before slicing it up...



I got three slices out of each piece of paper and needed 7 in total for each heart - you do the math for the number of hearts you'd like :)



As the space that I wanted to hang my garland in is only small I chose to make four hearts - they're quite big! I strung them on some wool, but if you had some twine this would look much better.

Here's my finished garland :)



I'm rather chuffed with it!

I'm going to make some more of these with a couple of alterations to make them even better! I'm also thinking of making mini ones as Christmas tree decorations!

What do you think?

Let's make this house a home! Part 1

So I thought I'd get straight in there!

Now I'm not setting myself any goals here, I'm not going to blog every day (that's a racing certainty) but I am going to try and blog as often as possible and because I want to keep you interested I don't want to leave you with just one post do I?

So...Here is my first glimpse at my handmade home :)

A new home needs decorating right? And if you can't (or can't be bothered to) paint or put up wallpaper you need to add pictures to the walls right? Well yes, but pictures are usually expensive and I'm not only very fussy when it comes to pictures, but I also resent spending good money on a mass produced picture (and there is no way I can afford something original at the moment!

This posed a dilemma for me because there is one thing I cannot do...paint/draw or anything that involves moving my hand over paper to create something pretty - I just don't have the hand-eye coordination thing down. So I had to come up with something else....

Well here it is!

You will need a piece of card, a frame and these two little lovelies:



I bought both of these on eBay for a grand total of about £5. Not bad hey? But what am I going to do with them? Well I'm going to stick, stick & stick some more!

I have a bit of a love for hearts, so naturally I'm making a heart picture, first stick down the outline, then fill it in! Don't worry about gaps between the buttons, just layer them until you're happy with the coverage; making it fabulously 3d is part of the fun! Once you're done sticking buttons to the card, leave it for about 5 minutes to make sure everything is secure, trim the card to fit the frame and Bob's your uncle!

You have one of these!



I was pretty impressed with myself :) And even better, my other half liked it too! And promptly popped it on the wall! Our little flat had started to feel more like a home already.

What do you think? Will you give it a go?

Little disclaimer note: Glue guns as shown above get HOT! Children should not use (at all really but if they must) unless under adult supervision. Be careful people, we don't like burns!