My Busy Craft Life

Hi all, It is the last day of February and as such my Fabulising February comes to an end. It's been a busy month but I feel like I have an entirely new wardrobe for summer :) This is the finished pile of most of the items I've finished. You haven't seen all of these as some were just quick mends such as a repaired seam, but these are all things I can now wear again! It's also extremely purple LOL If you haven't been following all the projects, here is a recap in no particular order: Bat Top Blue Top #1 1970s Towel Dress Blue Top #2 Asrai Top Labyrinth Bag Labyrinth Top Fleece Jacket Remake Knit Dress Felted Bag Hellish Bag Purple Ribbon Sweater Men's Shirt Dress I'm so pleased with all the results! There still a few things that I have not yet finished such as a red/black checkered dress (sorry Miriam!) and some other small items. But the majority is done and my mendi...

Hi everyone! Fabulising February is nearly over and this is the last project I have managed to complete.Tomorrow I'll post a short recap showing all the finished projects. Wanting to go out with a bang, I tackled a men's shirt that the bf bought online many years ago and forgot to return it so I wanted to make something nice out of it. Seems a waste to be throwing away a brand new shirt! Granted, it was white and while probably cotton it was very thick and stiff material. So I dyed it purple. Of course. Once it was purple, I then had to try and do something with it. Easier said than done! I finally found a cute idea for a dress in blogland (didn't save the link though) and I really wanted to try that. But the instructions were super tricky so in the mending pile it went. This is the shirt. Much too large even for the bf but purple at least ;) And a bit wrinkled for being in the bag for a very long time. But with only a little time left in my Fabulising February ...

Happy Oscar Night everyone! We're ahead of the US so the Oscars were on at 1.30am last night. NOT going to happen as I do have to work during the day. Luckily we have reruns! In the spirit of last year, I have spent most the weekend cooking to make one dish per Best Picture nominee. It was a real challenge this year as there were so many countries that the food would be based on, and I only got the final menu set in the last minute. Some dishes are more original than others, but it worked and was yummy which is all that matters. F irst: decorations! I made new bunting with updated templat es from Hostess Blog Napkin envelopes were also made again of course And then for the food! An entire day of chopping and preparing meant that I only had to stick everything in the oven and serve. I had bought lots of gold paper plates to the bling and easy cleanup. It all worked wonders!   For Amour : French cornichons and saucisson as aperitif   For Les Misera...

Heyhey! Remember how yesterday I told you how I had three of those blue flowy tops? Well, I wore one on a skirt I had amended and it looked really nice. Having some spare parts of the dress-turned-skirt, I decided to make the top a perfect match for the skirt. Let me remind you of the dress turned skirt, you might remember: This was the dress I got for £1 a long long time ago ... And it turned it into this . So far so good! Then, the blue top as discussed (the same as yesterday ) With some fabric scraps of the dress-to-skirt project, I added the straps of the dress to the neckline, and some of the sleeve fabric to the existing pocket on the front. Put the two together and you get this awesome result! I'm going to be wearing this a lot in summer! It looks really nice together I think :) The draping didn't quite work on the doll as all this is stretchy, but I just know it will be great in person. Another one bites the dust!

Good evening y'all! Ready for another project? I have so many quick fixes right now, I'm loving it! :) Today's project is about this top which has been in the mending bag for pretty much 2 years: Is it a dress? Is it a top? Let me explain. This top was on sale at Primark for £2 a long long time ago. It's too short to be a dress but great as a nice flowy top. Only problem with it: it's blue. Yes I would have noticed that when I bought it (duh!) so I had to adjust it so it would fit with more stuff. For a long time I didn't know what to do with it, and then suddenly I remembered this:   I bough t this lovely wo ollen r ibbon many years ago for next to nothing. I think I paid 25p a meter or something! The re was a huge sale so I got a lot of it. It has blue in it but also a some greyish so adding th is to the dress could work wonders . I added t he ribbon to the bottom of th e top and also along the hem of the sleeves. This is the e nd r...

Hi all! It's time for another Fabulising February project! Quite a while ago, a lady came to the sewing group with a pile of fabric she wanted to give away as she was moving. Within said pile of fabric, I spotted a very odd looking towel fabric with purple and beige flowers on it. No one really knew what to use it for, but I just had to have it. Everyone else thought it was so ugly, they were glad to choose something else from the options given. This is the fabric, for whatever reason I love it!   Totally 70s... So what to do with it? No, making a towel was not an option. The fabric seemed quite old and not at all nice and soft like new towels. Plus I gave away about 30 towels only a few years ago (that's what happens when two people have a lot of towels and move in together LOL, I managed to find someone who had their entire family flying in for her wedding and was desperate for towels, so I gave them to her. At least it was a good cause!). I searched online for ages f...

Hello again :) Most of you will not know who Asrai are, so let's clear that up first. Asrai are a Dutch 'girly goth' band that I happened to stumble upon at a festival many years ago. They had one London gig and I bought a really cute tanktop at their merchandise stall. The print was adorable but somehow I never warmed to the design of the tanktop itself. I have another shirt from them which is more of a normal girly tshirt and I wear that one a lot, so I decided to change the top. Of course this decision came waaaay before actually doing something about it, so the whole project ended up in the bag. The top on the left is another girly top I've had for a while and the neckline bothered me as it was a little tight. The top on the right is the Asrai tanktop. Ready for a makeover? I cut out the design and sewed it onto the plain top. The neckline still bugged me, so that definitely had to go. So I cut it into a sort of boat neckline and didn't hem it for a c...

Hello again! Speaking of Teefury, every few months they have a mystery sale. You just enter your size and they send you a mystery shirt from their collection of the past few weeks. Not exactly sure how it works, but basically you don't know what you're getting. And then there are swap forums etc in case you really hate it. I tried the mystery sale and being a newbie I ordered three shirts. One was great, one was so-so, and the last one put a real frown on my face. Let's put it this way, it had potential... This was the design I got: (picture from www.teefury.com ) The colour, for starters, was really not for me. Since I bought the girly version, I got the 80s blue one. Not my colour... Apart from the colour, there was another thing that was really bothering me, and that was that Jared actually looks fat in this design! Like proper beer-belly fat. Well, we can't have that now can we?  First I thought of swapping the shirt, but did I really want to go through al...

Hi everyone! How time flies, it's been a week since my last Fabulising February post! This week has just been so busy with Pancake Day, Valentine's Day, and the Egg Hunt! But I have my next project ready to show you here. It's been ready for a little while now but the photographing was a bit of a pain. Luckily, today I managed to get a nice picture of the final result, yay! About 6 months ago, I discovered Teefury. If you've never heard of this, it is a T-Shirt website that sells custom t-shirts for 24 hours only. Miss it and it's gone forever. Well, from their website at least, I have since found many more similar website and all the designers submit their designs to pretty much all of them. But anyway, I didn't know that at the time. The first t-shirt I bought through them was one based on the movie Labyrinth. It was adorable. It showed the little worm and was just very cute. Then it arrived.  The print is cute, right? But you can see that it is all c...

Hi everyone! Good news, the eggs are back :) Remember last year's egg hunt ? Well, I had a lot more time back then and spent a lot of afternoons hunting the fantastic works of art in egg shape. This time, they were only in London for six days instead of a month so I had to be quick. They're going on tour throughout the UK and they will be back but who knows what I'll be up to by then so better safe than sorry! As I also had to work, I had only this weekend to hunt them all down, there were 101 eggs to find this year. Lucky for me, they were all centralised in one location, they were all in Covent Garden. Some were in plain view, others were hidden away. The last one was quite hard to find, but I got them all except the moving egg that is being moved every day and clues are posted on Facebook. But the weather was really nice (at last!) and I actually went outside (though less time for projects). Curious yet about this year's eggs? Here is a selection of the best ones (a...