Say CHEESE!!

I do like a bit of cheese. Well, more than a bit actually, often a lot! And on everything.... But I'm trying to cut down so had to feed my addiction another way. A few months ago I decided that I simply MUST make a pin cushion that looked like a block of cheese. Once I had the idea in my head I couldn't rest until my creation was complete and ta-da:


Oh dear....not good, not good at all! Not really how I envisioned it! I showed it to my mum, who said, and I quote: "Ooooh that's nice, love the colours. Erm, what is it?" What is it? WHAT IS IT???!!! It doesn't even look like cheese when I put it on a plate with crackers and grapes.

At that point I had to admit that it didn't really look like a piece of cheese at all. It was too curvy. But I couldn't rest until I had my perfect felty piece of cheese, there must be a way to make it work, I couldn't embark on anything else until it was done! (Hmmm....maybe I am a bit stubborn and should learn to admit defeat...)

Some head scratching, felt snipping, bondawebbing and blanket stitching later I thought I might have cracked it:

What do you think? Much better I think (hope?!) you'll agree. Almost good enough to eat!

Although I have no idea what to do with the original....a similar thing happened on my quest for giant liquorice allsorts but I think that is a story for another day!

Dotty xx

TWIT TWOOO!

Have you noticed that owls are everywhere at the moment? For some reason crafters love owls. Maybe its that the big eyes mean you can make an impossibly cute softie. There's so many around that it takes something really special to catch your eye.

So imagine my joy when I was browsing round Paperchase (my favourite shop EVER) and I saw the owl range designed by jilly p. I couldn't resist the tea towels - gorgeous design and such a bargain!

Man, I really wish I'd ironed them before I took those pics! If you want to see more pictures of the range then take a look at this Print & Pattern post - much better pics than mine!! (Print & Pattern often features other Paperchase designs and is a fab blog so you should read it anyway!)

But the more I looked at my tea towels the more I didn't want to use them for drying dishes - they were way too nice for that! So, I formulated a plan to turn these fab prints into little softies. I embroidered round the design, added some buttons and used the small owl print fabric on the back and ta-da!

My own set of four jilly p. owls. Not bad for £5 tea towels eh? I leave them sitting amongst my books looking wise and learned!

I'm hoping they haven't sold out in Paperchase because I need to go back and buy another set to actually dry my dishes on!

Dotty xx

Exciting Times

Its been over a week since my last post - eeeek! I've had a bit of a tough week with very little crafting but some exciting things have been happening in my absence.

Firstly, thanks for all the lovely comments on the Disco Fish I featured in my last post. I had some great comments and emails and a couple have people have asked if I sell them or sell a kit to make them. I don't sell them at the moment but I'm currently thinking about prices and whether to make them into kits or not. I'll keep you posted! Thanks for all your support guys :-)


The lovely Patti from It's a Wonderful... was so taken with the fish that she featured them on her fab blog. And look at the little bubbles she added to my pic - such a cute idea. Thanks Patti :-)

Buoyed by every ones comments on the fish I decided to submit a picture of them to the One Pretty Thing flickr pool. If you don't read this blog then you MUST check it out - it is basically a roundup of all the craftiness going on in the blogosphere - loads of tutorials, advice, party ideas, giveaways....everything you could want really. It is one of my favourite blogs so imagine my excitement when I saw this post - my disco fish are featured - I am so proud. Thanks Rachel :-)

As if all this wasn't enough I got an email yesterday from Alex (full name Aleximo Croissant!) telling me that my strawberries had been featured in a strawberry based posting on the FolksyFinds blog. If you want to check out all the other lovely strawberries featured then take a look here. Thanks Alex :-)

I'm so excited I might burst!! And its motivated me to get back to my machine so hopefully I'll have some new goodies to show you soon....

Dotty xx

Disco Fish!

These are some softies I've been working on recently. I call them disco fish - partly because of the bright colours and partly because I think they look like they are grooving away :-)

The blue one is supposed to be a puffer fish and I just made the others up. Haven't decided what to do with them yet - considering making a mobile and I might put some in my shop. For now they are just hanging from my mirror - chilling and looking cool!

Dotty xx

I'm back.....

..........from 10 days away in North Cyprus. And I've missed you all lots!! Thank you so much for all the lovely comments on my first quilt that greeted me when I got back. They really cheered me up and helped me through my post holiday blues!

Since I've been back I've been catching up on all my favourite blogs and look what I found - my shoes! It was a bit of a surprise to find my pics on someone else's blog - I'd forgotten I'd emailed them over. Laura from Glue+Glitter has a fab feature on her blog where each week she gets a reader to show off their shoes and last week mine were featured! Check it out here if you are interested!

I've actually been back for a couple of days now but it has been a busy time - my brother has just got back from travelling round SE Asia for 6 months so there's lots of catching up to do and photos to admire (over 4000 pictures in fact!). With this in mind I promise not to bore you with lots of my holiday pics but I thought I'd just show you a pic of this little chap we met on the beach:


He was sooo cool and the way he walks is just brilliant. We think he is a chameleon (he had those eyes that rotate all the way round independently) but not totally sure. Anyway, they may be really common where you are but we enjoyed meeting him :o)

The only other pic I'll show you is this one - a photo of the abbey in the place where we stayed and an amazing view to look at whilst we had dinner!

I'm going to sign off now as I don't have much crafty news to share but don't worry I'll get back to work soon!

Dotty xx

Finished Quilt (& all the things I learned making it)

In my previous post I mentioned I was making my FIRST EVER quilt from Amy Karol's book "Bend the Rules Sewing". I have finally finished it - hurrah.




Before I read about the lap quilt in the book (and a few articles in Sew Hip) I never thought making a quilt would be something I could do - they seemed to big and time consuming and intimidating. Surely only proper grown ups with fancy industrial machines made quilts? It took a few weeks to convince myself that this was something that I could actually make but once I took the plunge I really enjoyed it. There were a few dodgy moments along the way but I am really pleased with how it turned out.


My quilt is not perfect (don't look to closely at the straightness of the lines!) and I have no idea what I am going to use it for (a bit pink and small for my bed) but I am sooo proud of it! Every time I look at it I can't believe that I made it. I learnt absolutely loads making this and next time it will be even better.

Since I mentioned I was making a quilt a few people have said that they had been thinking about doing the same so I thought I would give you a list of things that I learnt and found useful along the way. This is a bit of a jumbled list and is in no way complete or "correct" but hopefully someone out there will find it useful. Some of the points are a bit simple and may be obvious (this is definitely a beginners list!) but I put them down because they are things I want to remember next time I make a quilt. Hopefully this will be helpful to someone:


1. Making a quilt (even a simple one) takes quite a long time. When you are used to making little softies and pin cushions that can be done in less than a day this is a bit of a shock! The sense of achievement you get when you complete something keeps me motivated so I split the project into stages - choosing material, cutting material, sewing quilt top, cutting the batting and quilt back and pinning together with the top, quilting, making binding strip and finally sewing the binding onto the quilt. Splitting it down like this made it feel a lot more manageable.

2. Of all the stages cutting the pieces for the quilt top seems to be the most important. If the edges of your pieces are wonky then your quilt won't be square. I marked pieces up with a 30 cm ruler and cut my pieces by hand. I will never do this again! It took forever and was really difficult to get a decent straight line. If I make another quilt I will be investing in a rotary cutter and a decent straight edge.

3. Everything in quilting is referred to in yards and inches. This is very confusing when you have spent your whole life thinking in metric! I wasn't completely sure what a yard was until I asked my mum a couple of weeks ago. It still doesn't come naturally to me. Each time I want to work it out I have to think in stages - a yard is three foot, a foot is 12 inches, that's about 30 cm which means a yard is around 90cm, so just under a metre! I'm getting used to it slowly!

4. Don't start too big. The quilt I made is just over a metre square - much smaller than most quilts. When I was planning my quilt I was quite tempted to go bigger to make one that would fit on my bed, for example. I am SO glad I didn't. Even a metre square feels quite large and unwieldy when you are used to dealing with smaller pieces of fabric. Do your sewing on as large a table as possible - this makes it easier to move the quilt around.

5. Those fabric markers with ink that disappears after a couple of days or after washing are really useful - well worth the investment and much easier to use than chalk.


6. Once you have cut and arranged your pieces in the order you want take a break and come back and look at it again with fresh eyes - you might see a better way of arranging the pieces once your stepped back for a bit. When you are definitely happy with the arrangement take a photo so that you can refer back to it when sewing it all together. This was suggested in the book and is a really useful piece of advice. Remember to refer back to the photo - I didn't at one point thinking that I was confident I could remember the order and had to spend a boring half an hour unpicking one of my pieces!

7. When you've finished the quilt top iron it but be gentle otherwise you may stretch the fabric. On the other hand, if everything is a bit wonky a little bit of stretching can help things look more even! The book I used didn't specify how the seams should be pressed but a 10 minutes spent in Borders having a flick through some of the quilting books revealed that the general consensus was to press the seams to the side rather than open.

8. Once you have got the batting sandwiched between the quilt top and bottom correctly then hold it all in place by putting safety pins all over it, starting from the middle and working out. This works much better than holding it together with pins and is much quicker than basting / tacking the layers together. I believe you can buy special quilting pins to do this but I found regular safety pins worked just fine.

9. Treat your machine to a new needle before you start quilting - this makes such a difference when you are sewing through three layers of fabric. Also, check how much thread is on your bobbin regularly - it is so frustrating when you are halfway through a quilting line and your thread runs out!

10. Take regular breaks - I found if I didn't do this I got a bit impatient and ended up rushing the quilting which left me with a few wonky lines! It seems I need some practice sewing in straight lines!

11. Making your own binding is much easier than it sounds and actually really fun. Now I know how to do it I am going to use it in lots of other projects. I used one of these tools but I think it is fairly easy to do without the tool.

12. If you aren't that confident about something, in my case the binding, then it is definitely worth searching the internet. I found a flickr group for the BTRS book which had some useful discussion topics about the quilt. I also used this tutorial to check my understanding of the binding was correct. I also found this tutorial (thanks to Polka Dot Daze for the link) which uses a slightly different method but looks really useful and shows how to make binding without the tool.

13. Try not to be a perfectionist! This is my biggest problem. I could have spent ages unpicking and redoing bits of my quilt but I would never have finished. This time I was very disciplined and tried not to give into my perfectionist tendencies. I probably should have redone a few of my quilting lines but since I knew this was a learning exercise for me I decided to leave them in as reminders for next time. It is the overall effect of the quilt that matters and any little flaws just make it look a little more handmade (that's what I keep telling myself anyway!).

14. The final step is to wash and dry your quilt to give it that used, crinkly look. I can't give you any tips on that since I haven't done that yet. I keep putting it off as I am scared of it all going wrong and ruining all my hard work! When I do wash it I will let you know how it goes.

Finally, here is a list of useful quilty links I found:

Jaypeg gives some useful tips on designing your own quilt in her blog over a series of posts in January (scroll down). I will definitely be using these when I design my own quilt.

The two binding tutorials mentioned above are here and here.

And loads of free quilt patterns here, here, here, here and here. Some of these are quite tricky looking! Personally I am planning to do this one next - I love the zig zag effect.

I hope that was useful. If you made it this far down this marathon post and have any thoughts / questions / compliments / comments / abuse then please let me know!

Dotty xx

PS. Just to let you know, I am off on holiday tomorrow (woohoo!!) so there won't be any blogging around here for 10 days or so. I'm a bit worried I will miss being crafty so I have supplies with me: Issues 1&2 of Sew Hip which I have finally managed to get hold of (only issue 3 to get now!), a subversive cross stitch kit and a sketch book. Hopefully I'll return rested and full of crafty inspiration. Missing you already...

Fab weekend :o)

This weekend was one of the best I've had in ages and it was full of crafty goodness. Most of the weekend was spent at a fab workshop in London playing with these:




Yummy mosaic tiles. I've wanted to learn how to mosaic for ages so my hopes were pretty high for the course. I wasn't disappointed. Our teacher, Jo, took us through the basics of nipping mosaic tiles into different shapes and how to fix them and then we were away. After drawing a brief sketch on a piece of mdf we started nipping tiles into shape and sticking them to our boards. First we were all quite nervous - gently nibbling at the tiles but after half an hour or so small pieces of glass and ceramic were flying everywhere as we descended into a nipping frenzy. I was in heaven - the tiles were all so pretty and shiny and I got to play with them.

The design I had in mind before I arrived was for some stylised modern poppies but it turns out that red is one of the rarer shades of tile and there were no enough variations to make my plan work. In contrast green and blue came in every shade you could imagine since most tiles are made for the swimming pools! As I worked I started to understand the shapes I could make and the properties of the different tiles and adapted my design accordingly.

These were the results at the end of the first day:

During the second day of the workshop I really started to get the hang of cutting and placing the tiles. I was able to shape the tiles more accurately and I place them closer together. This was great although it did have the unfortunate side effect that I wanted to redo all the parts I did on Saturday! I resisted the temptation to do this (knowing I would never finish if I did) and this was the result by mid afternoon yesterday:

The last part of the process was to grout the tiles. As the colours I used were all quite light I went for a light grey grout. Its amazing the different that grouting makes - it completely changes the design. This was the finished result:

I am really pleased with it. It looks nothing like my original plan but it is more professional looking than I ever expected. I can't say that it is what I would do if I had the chance again - I would do something in much brighter colours (I think mine is a little wishy!) with different patterns (I'd like to do something more geometric I think) - but that is what learning is all about. One of the other great things on the course was seeing what everyone else was doing and seeing how it developed. I'd really like to have another go now I have a better understanding of what can be done with the tiles, how the colours look and what the grouting does to the design.

In the middle of the mosaic-ing weekend I also found some time on Saturday night to make 20 cards for my mum whilst watching a recording of Kirstie's Homemade home (my quilt is never going to be as good as hers!). The cards are good luck cards for my mum to give to the other performers in the amateur show she is in (it has a Mexican theme!). I think they are quite effective for something so cheap and quick to make:

Just before I stumbled off to bed last night exhausted but happy something supremely exciting and momentous happened. At 20.41 exactly I made my FIRST EVER SALE in my folksy shop. I am so pleased. YAY!

This little fella is already winging his way to a new owner. I know I will miss him but I'm happy to share his love with someone else! Plus, there is plenty more where that came from...

Now off to art class....

Dotty xx