fabric: pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

lovely to meet you Twitter Facebook Pinterest YouTube

Take a Scrapbooking Class

online scrapbooking classes

Shop Shimelle Products

scrapbook.com simon says stamp shimelle scrapbooking products @ amazon.com shimelle scrapbooking products @ amazon.co.uk

Reading Material

travel

Tulle Headband Tutorial

tulle flower headband tutorial
tulle flower headband tutorial
Today I’m happy to welcome Betsy Sammarco to the blog to share her technique for tulle flowers. They are perfect for wearing in your hair or adding to a layout! I hope you enjoy – let us know if you give this technique a try!

I was so happy when Shimelle asked if I’d share a technique with her blog readers. I was browsing around a handmade gift store where I saw little tulle flower barrettes. It looked like the edges were melted and I tried to recreate the effect myself.

tulle flower headband tutorial
Supplies: 3 rolls of tulle in coordinating colors, buttons and pearls for the flower centers, scissors, needle and thread, barbecue skewer, and small candle. I’m using tulle from Celebrate It, buttons from Jenni Bowlin Studio, and pearls from grandma.

tulle flower headband tutorial
1. Cut the tulle into pieces about 6 inches square.

tulle flower headband tutorial
2. Cut various sized circles from the tulle. To do this quicker, cut a couple pieces of tulle at one time.

tulle flower headband tutorial
3. Stick 2 or 3 circular pieces onto the end of a barbecue skewer. Hold the tulle close, but not directly into, the candle flame.

tulle flower headband tutorial
4. Turn the skewer so the edges of the tulle start to melt and the circle starts to curl up.

tulle flower headband tutorial
tulle flower headband tutorial
5. When you are done, you will have a bunch of tulle circles whose edges are now melted and more defined.

tulle flower headband tutorial
6. Layer your tulle circles until you get a look you like. Place a single stitch in the middle of the bunch to keep the layers together.

tulle flower headband tutorial
7. Stitch a button, pearl, or both into the center as your flower center.

I used one of these flowers as a sweet embellishment for a layout:
tulle flower headband tutorial
Other supplies: Jenni Bowlin Studio patterned paper, alpha stickers, rubons, button, journaling card, stick pin, and butterfly embellishment.

tulle flower headband tutorial
I love the dimension and definition this technique gives to tulle!



Betsy Sammarco is a Connecticut-based pharmacist with two sons and a love of papercrafts! She designs for Jenni Bowlin Studio and Jen Martakis Digital Designs. Read more about Betsy on her blog, Just a Pharmgirl.

Making a Rob Ryan Skirt with Clothkits

making a rob ryan skirt with clothkits
making a rob ryan skirt with clothkits

Rob Ryan’s designs never fail to inspire me. A little bit of paper-cutting style not unlike the wondrous Lotte Reiniger with an East London edge and phrasings that teeter from romantic to eerie. Some day maybe we’ll have an actual Rob Ryan papercutting on our wall. For now we have a greeting card version. But then those crafty mavens at Clothkits made it possible to wear Rob Ryan. And sew it yourself for the perfect fit. Oh where do I sign up for such a fabulous thing? So today, I made a Rob Ryan skirt, and it was tremendously easy, I promise.

making a rob ryan skirt with clothkits
Clothkits designs include everything you need except the tools: the fabric printed with the design and dress pattern, the lining fabric, the zipper and a spool of thread, plus an instruction sheet. Add to that your own pins, scissors, iron and sewing machine and that’s all you need. I also used some adhesive for tacking the zip – but that’s just my special kind of crazy so totally optional.

The full process is seven steps from start to finish, and it took me about an hour and forty minutes… which does make me feel a bit guilty since I bought this back in March! It’s okay: I don’t love it any less now than when I spotted it last spring. Good thing!

Here’s the seven steps for making the skirt, in case you fancy giving it a go…

making a rob ryan skirt with clothkits

Instead of pinning a paper pattern to your fabric and worrying about getting the print in just the right place, all you have to do is cut along the lines. Clothkits come with the design printed right onto the fabric (in this case, a heavy white cotton twill, but they also do this pattern on a red corduroy). All the sizes for the pattern are printed right on the same piece of fabric – this one was UK size 8 to 16, but according to the Clothkits website, they have now revised the printing so it’s sizes 8 to 20. (To give an idea in American sizes, a UK size 8 is roughly a US size 4.) You can easily make the skirt smaller, but as the screen print ends at the largest size, you wouldn’t be able to size it any larger. I am always nervous about pattern sizes, since dress patterns follow their own magical world of sizing that has no resemblance to what you might buy in a store, so I actually cut the largest size on the pattern first so I could pin it together and try it on in case it didn’t run true to size, but I’m happy report the size was the same I would get in the store, so no magical mystery size chart in the slightest.

There are six pattern pieces: the front of the skirt and two panels that make the back of the skirt, and a facing piece for each of those pieces, that sits inside the waistband of the skirt.

making a rob ryan skirt with clothkits

The lining fabric is a solid, plain cotton – lighter weight than the printed fabric. Line it up with the three main pattern pieces and cut a piece of lining to match each piece. My cuts were really wobbly and it didn’t matter at all, so don’t worry too much about the trace cutting being perfect.

making a rob ryan skirt with clothkits

Sewing the facing to the lining is the only confusing part of the process – it’s not really confusing at all once you think about it, but there was a drawing in the instructions that contradicted the words on the same instruction sheet. I checked their website and the same issue had been addressed, and there’s a mention that they might change the drawing so this might be nice and clear now, I’m not sure. Anyway, the trick is that if you place the facing and the lining so the angles match up… then it will not work. So don’t sew them that way – the curves that don’t match up will work perfectly. It’s hard to pin but easy to sew, so I’ll admit I usually just hold them in place and don’t pin the whole piece, especially with cotton since the fabric isn’t slippery.

making a rob ryan skirt with clothkits

Now for making the skirt come together. Sew the two smaller panels together to form the back, leaving the top free to add the zipper in just a bit. Then sew to the front panel and check the sizing to make sure everything is still looking right. Do the same thing with the lining pieces. Press the seams apart as you sew the pieces together – definitely worthwhile later as everything will sit nice and flat rather than puckering at the seams.

making a rob ryan skirt with clothkits

Adding the zipper is next – before you sew the lining into the skirt. Sewing zippers is one of those things I think you have to try a few times and get a system that works right for you. I know so many people who swear by basting them in, but I don’t have much luck with that and get all twisted. I actually glue the edges of the zipper in place and then stitch with the zipper foot of my sewing machine. This tutorial is pretty close to how I add a zipper.

making a rob ryan skirt with clothkits

Stitch the facing + lining into the waist of the skirt. This is where you’ll be glad you pressed all those seams! Essentially this is just one line of stitching all around the top of the skirt, then fold it all the right way along and go back to the ironing board and press the waist of the skirt so the lining stays inside and the top edge is nice and neat. Then run another line of stitching to hold it in place.

making a rob ryan skirt with clothkits

And then fold and iron to hem the bottom edge. This fabric hemmed really easily – and I am often rubbish with skirt hems, so easy-to-hem fabrics make me happy. Do make sure you try it on before you hem the lining layer — less work to cut it shorter before you hem than to put it on later and realise the lining is hanging lower than the skirt. (Does it sound like I have made these types of mistakes on skirts before? Because there might be a reason for that.)

making a rob ryan skirt with clothkits

And then get so excited to wear your lovely new skirt that you ignore the temperature in single-digits and think your red shoes will be the perfect answer, despite being summer sandals. I suppose that step is optional.

Now, no laughing if you see me any time in the next month and I’m wearing this, because I’ll probably want to wear it every day for a while. But maybe with more seasonally appropriate footwear.

xlovesx

PS: If you would like a Christmas scrapbooking kit, be sure to stop by tomorrow for details for UK addresses, or check out the week long holiday sale at Two Peas – it starts today and includes free US shipping for all orders over $25.

VIP Party Guest :: Kirsty

handmade minibooks

A warm party welcome to the ever-adorable Kirsty who is another over-achiever: she’s made two projects to share with you today! Click over to her blog to see them.

Despite the fact that she almost lives within walking distance (well, I qualify most of London as walking distance. It just might be a very long walk.), I have never met Kirsty in real life. But of course I read her blog, follow her tweets, talk to her by email – that sort of thing. So now I have this little picture in my head of what her life is like, and I’m almost afraid to meet her because I think my picture could be wrong and I don’t really want to find out. Kirsty is a crafter and a writer by profession and everything she makes amazes me. She works in truly creative ways. She previously posted the pajama project here during A Month of Colour I know you will love her blog!

A Kirsty trivia question for you: What literary classic inspired Kirsty to decorate a carton of eggs?

The answer is on her blog—post your guess here in the comments. {By the way, don’t worry about being ‘too late’ to post the answer to the trivia question. At the end of the weekend, I am going to throw all the trivia question comments in a hat for some prizes—and you don’t have to be first to find the answer.}

xlovesx

Crafty Christmas :: Advent Calendar

advent calendar

Here’s the thing. It’s all well and good finding adorably cute pajamas at Gap Kids that would fit no one you know but are on sale making them cheaper than buying fabric by the yard. It’s all well and good cutting them up a few days later and sewing them into little pockets. It’s all well and good having plans to find a quiet evening sometime in the future to make them cuter with all manner of little buttons and things. It’s all well and good to have plans to fill them with chocolates. Tiny, tiny chocolates.

What’s not at all well and good is to hang them in front of the radiator.

So now they are empty and the chocolate is mostly eaten.

When good crafts go bad, I tell ya.

xlovesx

Inspiring me lately:

...The Last Lecture from late professor Randy Pausch. Which reminded me of both the ‘When I Grow Up’ scrapbook project and a few exceedingly inspiring professors from my own studies.
...Ysolda’s uncanny ability to write knitting patterns that are immediately fun as soon as the yarn is on the needles. I’m working on Liesl in the mid-length, in red, for a bit of chill time else I could be awake from now until the 31st of August from energy. But this is how special it is: I. Knitted. A. Swatch. It’s shocking.
...Style Me Pretty for making me extra excited and making me think about lots of tiny little details

...And arpeggios. Because I have finished an arrangement for string quartet and now I cannot wait to hear it with four real instruments instead of computerish sounds. I actually used the skills I learned in music theory class! This is clearly why I minored in music. So I could reinvent the wheel with the explicit purpose of throwing a good party.

A warning: I have kept so much a secret so far. For seventeen months, this did not become a wedding blog. Tomorrow marks one month away.

This will totally be a wedding blog for the next thirty-one-ish days.

!!!!!

xlovesx

On Christmas gift philosophy

This time last year, the boy was having very challenging taste in scarves. We picked yarn, I bought yarn and then he decided he wasn’t so keen on that yarn anyway. We picked one pattern, I started that and he decided he wasn’t keen on that either. I started again with the idea that he liked and ended up with a scarf that was twenty-seven feet long. So I started a third time and came up with something that wasn’t marvellous but it was okay. In the right light, it might even have been nice. But mostly it was okay.

Bless him, challenging taste and all, he wore the scarf and lived through the Dr Who jokes. In fact, the Dr Who jokes seemed to endear him more to the garment and he then rarely left the house without it.

Until I was out of town and got a call. The scarf had accidentally taken up residence on a train, along with other necessary items like a back-pack and an umbrella. And really, he really, really wanted me to know he hadn’t done it on purpose.

Please keep in mind that I am far easier to make fun of than the boy. He is immune. He tells me this is because between the three siblings, they teased each other enough that nothing sticks anymore. I, on the other hand, turn bright red at the smallest thing. I seriously have some days where I am just embarrassed to live, really. I am that easy to wind up. With this in mind, I have wasted not one single opportunity to tease someone about leaving his really-ugly-really-scratchy-but-handmade scarf on the train.

It must have worked. When we were in Victoria I agreed to knit him another scarf, but he had to pick the yarn. And he did finally succumb to going into a wool shop, and having learned his lesson from last year, went for something that could never become scratchy. And since then I have been knitting baby alpaca into 2×2 rib whenever I have a few minutes to sit down. It’s far more lovely (and simple) than last year’s scarf. And I am considering stitching it to the back of his coat so it doesn’t get left on any train.

So that is half of this story. The other half is that when you move, you realise you have a lot of stuff. Everyone out there will tell you to purge your belongings before you move so you have to move fewer boxes. But as we had basically a week to pack everything, and we were both working at the same time, we had a hard time with that. We mostly boxed up everything in sight, with the plan to purge as we unpacked. Which yes, is backwards. But in the end, we ended up with more to purge than we thought, as we accidentally put some boxes of recycling into the moving van and brought them with us. It was just a little freaky to open a box and think ‘But I’m sure I got rid of that!’ only to realise the box just went to the wrong place. {And no, so far we do not think we accidentally put any boxes of good stuff into the recycling. Hopefully.}

So anyway, those who helped us move and those who have been here since can tell you in no uncertain terms that we have too much stuff. And then we started to think about Christmas…and where would we put all our new stuff, and it just about made us fall over. There was this little plea from the boy that he really didn’t need me to buy him lots of stuff for Christmas.

But I really like giving people stuff at Christmas.

We talked through a gazillion options that I considered writing out there, but honestly, you are getting nearly to exhaustion point with reading this anyway. So here’s what we came up with: we will give handmade. It’s that simple. Since handmade ends up being more about time and thought than what the stack of presents looks like under the tree, this will work. And we hope the people who receive our handmade goodies will appreciate them. And in cases where we couldn’t handmake things ourselves for everyone on our list (because really, we should have started this earlier, but what else is new?) we hope we can support other people who make things by hand.

And you know what? I haven’t stood in a single Christmas shopping queue. I haven’t stressed over a sold-out item. I haven’t counted things up to see if they will look like a suitable stack of gifts. Of course, it’s a little early to know if everything will be well-received, but so far, so good. We’ve given those jars of cocoa and this stripey quilt, and they went over well. In fact, I can see the traffic jams from here of people cramming the main road that heads to shopping nearby…and while they are doing that, I’m sitting on the sofa with knitting needles, supersoft alpaca and hot chocolate. Which I think is pretty much okay. Even more than okay.

May you give presents you love, receive something that makes you smile and have a place to put all of your stuff this Christmas.

xlovesx

The Flying Circus

This week, Ali has been talking about the entire concept of doing something creative every day. It’s certainly something some people have to do. I remember being told all sorts of stories about the crazy things that creative types—writer, musicians, actors, artists—will do when they are not getting what they want from their art. I mostly remember because I would be told such stories when I had just done something royally stupid and dramatic, or when one of my creative-type friends had done similar and I was pouting about it. You know, like when people stop by your drive-thru window to tell you they just put a guitar and a sleeping bag in their car and they are just going to drive until they figure life out. Oh, and could they borrow five bucks? Apparently, lack of artistic outlet can make you think that rationally, you can drive from Kansas to Oregon on $5 and a guitar. That’s some artistic thinking, even back in 1995.

So maybe the reason I am more sane now is a little bit linked to the fact that I do get to do creative stuff pretty much every day. I would say it was just maturity, but I am the crankiest girl on the street if I don’t make stuff for more than three days. So yeah, there is definitely a link. Now if only I could have the same reaction to housework. Oh sorry I was moody. It’s just that there’s this one coffee cup that needs washing. I’ll be right back.

Although I never wanted to drive to Oregon on a borrowed five bucks, I did want to run away and join the circus. Obviously. They got to wear cool make-up and sequins and fly through the air with the greatest of ease. They got to see the world! They didn’t have to go to normal school. (I was so obsessed with learning but not so much with traditional school, at times. A personal tutor with the perspective of a circus performer was a fabulous idea!) They lived in happy, pastel shades like Busted Wonder. Everything was always pretty and happy and they ate cotton candy for breakfast, lunch and dinner. (No, at that point I had not read this. And a million other things. Clearly. I read Jill Krementz books, watched things like this and imagined lots of sparkles and cotton candy. I mean seriously, how could you be unhappy if you could do a triple-and-a-half somersault way up in the air, just because?)

{A total aside: that whole series of children’s books are gorgeous. They are both child biography and photo essay and I would sink into them for hours, years after I could read things much more difficult. I only learned this week that she was married to Kurt Vonnegut. And that has explained so much to me.}

Anyway, I never joined the circus. But I do seem to be travelling a bit more and I won’t be going to a traditional school this September. So I need a circus skirt, right? Hence my creative thing for Thursday. With circus colours and polka dots and ruffles. Cotton candy and trapeze flying skills not included. One thing at a time.

Speaking of one thing at a time, check out the Banana Frog blog today. I’ve posted a little tutorial and there’s a contest over there this weekend.

That’s way easier than joining the circus, and with fewer scary people.

xlovesx

In bloom

Oh my goodness is my favourite thing to say as of late. As in ‘Really we have to wait until to September to find out what happens next? Oh my goodness!’ (For although I have no TV I have one particular weakness that I download on iTunes, and oh my goodness that was a cruel cliffhanger.) And ‘Did I really leave the burner on while we were eating dinner? Oh my goodness!’ And then there’s this one:

Oh my goodness there are so many online tutorials for adorable fabric flowers!

Okay, so maybe my oh my goodness is starting to lose its meaning, but it’s true. Here are but a few:
Origami influenced
Felted fabulousness
Hairpin sized
and a very classy one from Blair of WiseCraft

I was also loving the one featured about halfway down this post from the new issue of Cotton and Paint (from Japan).

This one was made with scraps leftover from my new pink polka dot skirt. I traced the bottom of a bottle of paint and cut 25 pink circles and 6 black circles, then stitched them all together by piling them onto the needle and then moving the petals around until they spread out. Then stitch back up to the middle, add the button and keep the thread very tight so the petals pucker a bit. Sew a pin back to a small circle of felt and hot glue the felt to the back of the flower, and all done. All done so quickly you might say ‘Oh my goodness, I could make these all day!’

Or that could just be me.

xlovesx