My Busy Craft Life

Good morning everyone!!!! I am so excited as I am on holidays!!! Let me explain: in the UK we have like a handful of bank holidays, by far the fewest in all of Europe. This year, Easter is really late (so no Elf Fantasy Fair that I could mak e) which gives us two bank holidays and therefore 4 days off. The Prince William is kind enough to get married the Friday after Easter giving us an extra bank holiday *does happy dance*. The the first Monday in May is also a bank holiday. And all of them being so close together, I just got 11 days off for the price of three!!! I didnt book anything (bad me) but I'm sure I will find lots of nice things to do and places to go :) So here I am, on my roof terrace, in the scorching heat (it's not even 10am and already well over 20 degrees C) blogging outside, how cool is that! You might have noticed that last week's Mending Week only had 5 days in it. I did have at least one more post and am sure I could have found another, but we were actu...

About 5 years ago (wow, 5 years already! And at a time when I thought that all medieval dresses had to be velvet), the bf and I and some friends went to the Joust. At the time this was a huge festival and it was the first year of having a medieval banquet of the night before. We even had a private concert by the Mediaeval Baebes ! Sadly the festival went bankrupt due to flooding but I think they're up and running again now. A lovely banquet of course called for a lovely dress and I had this fabric lying around that I once bought for only £5 at the charity shop. it had a good few meters so enough to make a lovely dress. I had it all planned... and then discovered that the fabric was stretchy so all the plans went out the window. The entire dress was made without a pattern and had a empire line and 4 panels. The ribbon was handstitched on and the back had to be tied as the ribbon doesnt stretch but that part of the dress really does! The end result wasnt too bad: I even made a matchi...

Well, the rosette mentioned in yesterday's post will have to wait. Let's mend some more first rather than start something new. After all, this bag needs to become empty (or emptier at least) One the same thrift shopping day as mentioned yesterday, I also bought this: Yes, o£1 again and totally cute :) Or so I thought... I actually did wear this to work once or twice and people asked me if I had made this myself . Not sure if that was a compliment really... I love the neckline but wasnt a bit fam of the sleeves. They were too ruffly as they actually stood away from the sleeve most of the time, making me look like some sort of winged creature, and not in a good way. So the sleeves had to go, at least partially. I cut off the ruffles and added some of that ruffling elastic thread (cant think of the name right now). They didnt work out quite as fuffy and princessy as I wanted them to be but all in all this is better than the ruffle sleeves. And yes, this is the same top, though th...

During one of my thrift shopping trips , I came across this dress: I thought it would be really cute for summer, but alas the top bit was so low that it nearly ended on my belly button. Not something to wear in public. As this was only £1 at the time and I liked the fabric, I figured I would do something with it sooner or later. And now I have! All I did was cut up the top, hem it, add some elastic, and voila: my new summer skirt: I love it now :) I actually had to tighten the elastic a bit after making it a little too wide at first, but it fits really nicely and it's very cheerful for summer. Mmm, I might go mini this year :) I still have the remainder of the fabric left, maybe I will make a head band or so for it? Definitely not a flower again at least hihi! Oooh maybe one of those spin rosettes that everyone seems to be made now :) Watch this space!

Day two of Mending Week. Remember the jeans skirt from my ' One Jeans, Two Outfits ' post way back when? Well, I never actually wore it as the elastic was never really right and I always felt there was something missing. This was the skirt. Cute but no cigar. It needed something... I know, it needed a flower! So after fixing the elastic properly and adding the flower, it fit much better and looked even cuter :) I need to put it on over my head but that shouldnt spoil the fun. Check it out: I dont know about you, but I suddenly like it much better and may even wear it to work on Friday! Dont mind the picture btw, the bf was away and I had to use the self timer... Anyway, another item fixed, this is going well so far :)Mind you, I have a very large bag of items to get through...

Let's have a theme for a change. The whole week I will share with you some easy projects I did by mending/changing some of my clothes. I'll start off easy ;) On Saturday evening I suddenly got the urge to sew. The question was, sew what? I didnt want to start a new project as I have too many ideas for stuff to make that I just didnt know where to begin. So I decided to take some stuff out of my 'to mend bag' and start from there. There were quite a few easy projects in there and in the end I was sewing until 5am! But I got some nice things done which I will share with you in the Mending Week. A whole week of mended stuff, some big, some small, but all with just that extra difference :) Let's start off with something that made re-discover my love for Halloween. I had these PJ pants that have been in this bag for about a year now *blush*. All it needed was some new elastic, but as I was putting the elastic in, I noticed that the legs had this pink on black ribbon on t...

The third and final part of my present to my friend who will be giving birth to twins very soon :) This part of the present arent technically clothes (ok, not at all) but I wanted to keep the post organised. My inspiration for this came from this post about Eli the Elephant at the Little Birdie Blog . At first, I didnt want to make any stuffed animal or anything as I was sure that they would get stuff like that from everyone. But as I read through the blog post, I was inspired not by Eli the Elephant, but by a die which she also made and happened to be in the picture. (photo by Little Birdie Baby , hope you dont mind!) See the die on the top left hand side? That's the one :) This whole package was a lovely idea but I really wanted to only make the dice. After all, I needed two :) Remember the cupcake bathrobe ? LOL after all that promoting you probably will. I had a ton of this lovely blue fleece leftover from my old bathrobe which would be perfect for this project. So I washed it...