My first crafting Christmas

It's an exciting time of year, and it's a time when I usually hand make gifts for family and friends, but this festive season is even more exciting for me than usual. This is my first Christmas as a professional crafter, and I've been planning for it since August when I first drew up plans for some special Christmas items for the Lucky Ladybird shop.

Plans for a mince pie purse

Plans for a Christmas pudding clutch

Having drawn up the plans I didn't actually start to make either of these until after Hallowe'en when I was first able to dedicate some time to Christmas. I made some prototypes, did my best to improve on the designs and then was able to put together the finished items in early November. It gave my husband a shock to see I'd unpacked the Christmas decorations a month early so I could take some suitably festive photos!

Mince pie and Christmas pudding purses

The Lucky Ladybird collection in a festive setting. The decorations when back into the box after this photo was taken!

The mince pie and Christmas pudding purses have a red polka-dot lining (unlike most Lucky Ladybird items which have a pink polka-dot lining) and are embellished with sprigs of holly instead of the traditional felt strawberry, but they're still soft and fleecy like my other creations with plenty of felt detailing.

Once the Christmas specials were designed and made I decided that the website could do with a Christmas makeover. I added a special 'Christmas Shop' section where my products are arranged into useful categories for anyone looking to buy gifts. The exclusive Christmas items and gift sets are easier to find and visitors can also browse items by price to make it easier to shop for stocking fillers.

After the website re-launch I managed to find some time to write a quick tutorial for a website called PVB Daily. They had put out a request for 12 Christmas-themed tutorials for a 12 days of Christmas crafting feature, and I was thrilled when they decided to include my guide to making your own Christmas pudding tree ornament for day 6. As you can see from the picture the decoration is a simplified version of my Christmas pudding coin purse.

Tutorial available at PVB Daily

The rest of November I spent stocking up on my most popular items ready to attend my first ever Christmas craft fair in Donnington near Telford. The venue (Cordingley Hall) was new to craft events, but when I found out that there would be hot food and a special Santa's Grotto for the kids I could tell it would be a popular local event.

 

The morning of the fair I packed plenty of tinsel and even wore my Christmas jumper to get into the spirit. The Christmas music playing in the hall helped set the scene and when the doors were opened the venue was quickly packed with visitors. 

Me set up and ready to go at the Christmas craft fair

Santa's visit was a big local attraction as predicted and there was also a surprise visit from a dancing reindeer! There was mulled wine at the bar which helped to warm us up, but by the afternoon the hall was quiet. Fortunately it so happened that many of the stall holders were on the look out for handmade gifts, me included! In the last hour I bought some handmade chocolates and some pretty hand-carved wooden gifts from my fellow crafters. They returned the favour by buying some special Christmas items from me, which made for a nice end to the day. 

One thing I've learned in my first year of professional crafting is that many good craft fairs are booked far in advance, sometimes over a year before they take place. There are lots of local events that I would love to have taken part in but which were organised well before I was even thinking about self-employment! I've already signed up to take part in a Christmas craft fair in December 2014 in Shrewsbury and I plan to be at many more if I can. Christmas is a great time of year for family events like craft and vintage fairs, especially in Shropshire. 

Happily my stockists have also arranged Christmas events this year, and my items have also been available through them. Urban Folk took Lucky Ladybird items to a special Pop-Up Shop at Eat Up in Shrewsbury as well as to a Christmas Fayre at Concord College at the end of November. The Shropshire Hills Discovery Centre are getting in on the action too with a ‘Shopping and Santa Special’ this Sunday 8 December. There will be crafts and stories and a visit with Santa for the kids and mulled wine for the adults as a well as a relaxed atmosphere perfect for doing some Christmas shopping.

Until next time good luck with all your Christmas preparations. Lots of love

LLxx

Stockists, stalls and stocking-up

I'm so happy to say that October turned out to be a great month for Lucky Ladybird Crafts. After a slow September I was thrilled to be able to start the month my announcing the the winner of my cupcake gift box competition. The new cupcake flavour will be blueberry, photos to follow very soon!

Soon after I found out that my first ever stockist, Tea & Roses of Bridgnorth, was moving to a larger premises in Bridgnorth. I organised to pick up my stock while the move took place, and it turned out my items had been selling better than expected! Lucky Ladybird items will be back in stock in Tea & Roses in November when the move is complete.

Tea & Roses in Bridgnorth - now moving to a larger premises also on Bridgnorth high street

Shortly afterwards I was contacted by the Shropshire Hills Discovery Centre in Craven Arms who found me via my Twitter feed. They were on the look-out for stockists for their new Shropshire-made Christmas shop. I took some items along and they're now for sale until Christmas along side some beautiful woodwork, glass work and jewellery, all hand made in Shropshire. It's a great centre with a library, gallery, cafe and exhibitions so I recommend a visit if you're in the Shropshire area.

Shropshire Hills Discovery Centre cafe/gallery space

Lucky Ladybird bags and purses alongside boards and platters by wood artisan Spencer Edwards

 

I spent the rest of October preparing for a Halloween stall in the Parade shopping centre in Shrewsbury. I made plenty of Day of The Dead items and a few bat badges as well as some simple sushi clutch purses to fill out the stall.

Special Day of The Dead badges

Halloween stall in Shrewsbury with new egg nigiri and shrimp nigiri clutch purses (centre left)

It was such a busy day with cosplayers and shoppers, competitions and kids in costumes, but I made time to drop by my Shrewsbury stockist Urban Folk while I was close by. It seems the people of Shrewsbury just love my cake charms, I'll just have to start making some more!

Urban Folk on Grope Lane in Shrewsbury

Lucky Ladybird purses for sale in Urban Folk

I've got lots of plans for November already, and you won't be surprised to learn that Christmas features heavily! I'll be preparing for Christmas craft stalls in Donnington and Shrewsbury by making some special edition Christmas items and I'll be adding a new Christmas area to my website with lots of gift ideas and boxes for the festive season. In the mean time you can keep up to date with my new projects at www.facebook.com/LuckyLadybirdCraft or by following my Twitter feed @Lucky_Ladybird

Wishing you a happy November,

LL xx

Pumpkin Pincushion

This is a quick guide to creating a truly terrifying Halloween pumpkin pincushion. Pierce them through with pins or have them haunt your desk or Halloween table display.

First cut six identical leaf shapes around 3.5" in length from orange felt.

Sew the long edges of these pieces together in matching thread to create a ball shape, but leave one seam open. Turn the ball right side out.

Cut the eyes and mouth from black felt. For eyes cut matching triangles. For a mouth draw a zig-zag on the felt in chalk and cut around this to create a jagged jaw.

Arrange the features and sew them in place while the ball in still open at the back, only a couple of stitches will be needed to keep them in place. Next stuff the pumpkin with toy filling, or failing that cotton wool. When tightly packed join the final seam with a neat blanket stitch. Your creation is now almost alive!

Finally cut a thin strip of brown felt around 1.5" long and 0.5" thick. Roll this length up to create the stalk.

Secure this roll in place with a couple of stitches, but before tying off the thread press the stalk on to the top of the pumpkin and draw the needle through the body of the pumpkin and out of the bottom. Pull the thread tight to create the right pumpkin shape. Finally push the needle back up through the body of the pumpkin and secure the stalk. Pierced twice through the heart your should be a truly diabolical creation!


Happy Halloween everyone!

Vintage Crafting

I always find living museums inspire me to craft. Getting a glimpse into the way people lived only 100 years ago always reminds me of the utility of skills like sewing, weaving and knitting. It's easy to forget that lots of popular crafts arose out of a need to make use of every scrap of material that was available. Quilters now seem to spend a small fortune on fat quarters in co-ordinating colours, but in the past quilts were a thrifty use of fabric scraps too small to be fashioned into anything else.

Another craft that makes clever use of small scraps of fabric is rag-rugging. With a section of hessian, and a collection of cotton or wool scraps you can make a soft and colourful rug. Last week I went on a day trip to Blists Hill Victorian Town in Shropshire, a recreation of a Shropshire town during the industrial revolution complete with railway, fairground and working high street. We saw demonstrations of metal working, candle making, baking and wood working but my attention was caught by a sample rag-rug kit. All the recreation homes in the town were furnished with rag rugs and I decided it would make a lovely souvenir of the day.

The kit came in a paper bag and contained a square of hessian (about 13" square), a wooden prodding tool and a bag of cotton strips, mostly of green white and pink. I ended up supplementing the fabric scraps with some of my own to add colour and also to use up some small pieces of fabric I had spare.

 

The method recommended in the instructions was to 'prod' the fabric through the hessian from the back of the work rather than to hook it through from the front.It was very quick and easy to create rows of prodded strips.

To finish the rug I folded the 1" allowance back and sewed it into place. The instructions suggested using fabric glue for a no-sew option. The final result is lovely, if a little small.

The floral strips you can see this photo were offcuts from making bunting, something I'll be posting about next week.

I'd recommend the kit as a gift for anyone looking for some crafty inspiration. Now I know how easy rag-rugging is I'm determined to make a larger one for my living room, and I've certainly got a large enough collection of fabric scraps that would otherwise go to waste, so that's lucky!

A daffodil for springtime

It looks like spring has finally begun, and in this part of the world the daffodils are opening. Here's a quick guide to creating your own daffodil to celebrate!

You will need:
Yellow, orange or white felt
Needle and thread
A button
A safety pin

1. Cut a semi-circle from your chosen colour of felt. Cut notches into the outside edge of the circle. Curl the semi-circle into a cone and sew together where the edges meet.



2. Cut a circle from felt and fold and cut as shown to divide the circle into six petals.





3. Shape each petal as shown.



4. Push the button into the cone and the cone onto middle of the petals. Sew the button in place through all layers to bind everything together.



5. Sew a safety pin onto the back and wear with pride!

Rough and ready recycled notebooks

As some of you may know by day I work in an Italian coffee shop, and because it's fairy new we've still not been able to set up all the recycling facilities that I would like to see. As a result all the staff have been making an effort to reuse and recycle anything useful that normally would be thrown away. One lady has been taking home honey-jars to put her preserves in, another has been taking home and painting our unwanted jam jars. I've been concentrating on collecting all the interesting paper that is used as packing material. Our deliveries come straight from Italy, and for some reason the Italian suppliers use interesting, and sometimes beautiful, papers to wrap delicate items. Gathering them up I noticed that the papers included pictures of smiling housewives, ice-cream cones, footprints, meat products, cows and pastoral scenes. It seemed like a tragedy to throw that paper away, so I've been re-purposing it and binding it into notebooks using cardboard packaging to create hard covers. The technique is really simple, all you need are basic sewing skills, and after a bit of practice you can create something beautiful, unusual and useful in under an hour.

Inspiration for this project comes from Esther K. Smith and her fantastic book How to Make Books. If you like the idea of sewing or folding your own books then I highly recommend her book.

You will need:

Plain or printed packing paper

A thin cardboard box with a nice printed design on the front. Anything that catches your eye.

Pencil, ruler and scissors

A thumb-tack or noticeboard pin

A large needle

Brightly coloured thread

Bulldog clips (also known as butterfly clips)

Begin by choosing a cover for you notebook. Any thin cardboard box will make a great cover. Consider the size of notebook you are hoping for and carefully cut separate front and back covers for your notebook making sure that they are of equal size.

To make the pages of your notebook measure your cover. Each page should measure the same height as the cover, but double the width. From my experience twelve pages cut in this way makes a nice size of notebook. Fold each page in half widthways and stack them together so that the folded edges face left. Already you can begin to see the notebook taking shape!

Before you can start binding the pages together it's a good idea to prep the covers by scoring them where the notebook needs to be hinged. Measure 1 ½ cm (or 1inch) from the left-hand edge, mark this with pencil and score gently with a pair of scissors. Gently bend each cover along this scored line to make sure your notebook can be easily opened.

Now you can start putting the notebook together! Put the front cover on top of your stack of pages and the back cover behind. Check that all the pages are facing the right way and then line the whole thing up as neatly as you can by tapping the spine on a flat surface. Secure the stack in place with bulldog clips on the top, bottom and on the right-hand edge. Leave the left-hand side free so you have room to sew. If you think the bulldog clips might dent the covers then use pieces of scrap paper to cushion the clips.

To begin piercing the spine find the mid-point along the fold you created in the front cover. You can measure this or judge by eye. Press a thumb-tack into the fold. Make sure you do this on a soft surface! Flip the book over and press the thumb-tack into the back of the hole you just created, just to make sure the hole is clear and will be easy to sew through. Now measure the mid-point between the central hole and the top of the book. Pierce another hole in the fold the same way as the first. Finally repeat the process by finding the mid-point between the central hole and the bottom of the book. You should now have three equally spaced holes along the spine, like this:

Now you can bind everything together. Thread a large needle with 1 ½ metres or so of brightly coloured thread and thread the needle through the central hole, front to back. Leave a tail of thread on the front of the book, this can be tied off later. Once through, bring the needle to the front of the book again and thread it again front to back, creating a loop which wraps around the spine.

Turn the book over and thread the needle through the lower hole, back to front. You will see you have begun to create a mixture of horizontal and vertical threads, the horizontal wrapping around the spine and the vertical following the line of the fold. Re-pierce the lower hole, back to front once again, and you will have created a horizontal thread for this hole too.

In order the finish the bottom of the notebook you need to complete the vertical thread, to do this simply bring the needle down to the bottom of the book and re-pierce the lower hole one final time, back to front. The thread should follow the fold around the bottom of the book, like this:

The thread should now be at the front of the book, so put the book face-up again and thread the central hole again, front to back. Take the needle up to the upper hole and, as with the lower, pierce it back to front twice to bind it horizontally. To complete the upper half of the book bring the needle upper over the top of the book so that the thread follows the line of the fold. Pierce the upper hole a final time, back to front. All there is left to do is to tie the working thread to the tail left at the central hole. The thread should look as pictured without any doubling-up or any gaps. Release the bulldog clips and your notebook is complete!

Once you get more confident you can try to incorporate buttons and beads into you design, or can can experiment with more unusual binding patterns.

I've become a bit obsessed with notebook-making over the past month or so and have made far more than I can ever use, so if you like the look of any of the notebooks pictured or don't have access to interesting Italian packing papers then take a look at my etsy shop where I have many for sale.

Thanks very much for reading and even greater thanks to my boyfriend for putting up with the bales of paper that have taken over our house recently!

Stay lucky everyone

x x x