Time for tea birthday card

For my Mum's birthday recently I wanted to make a unique card that was celebratory and also special. Tea time is the epitome of life at my family home - it's when we all come together and have a nice warm drink, probably a biscuit or bit of cake and catch up. And the best thing is it happens any time of the day! So choosing a theme that was so regular, but physically and literally heart-warming and comforting, and making it special by hand-stitching fabric on to card to make the image, seemed the perfect thing to do.

I began by cutting out shapes of fabric from templates I had drawn roughly on paper to make the components of the teacup, handle and saucer. After hemming each shape with a light running stitch so the frayed edges were all hidden I simply glued the cup and saucer sections together with PVA.

 

When it was fully dry I then glued the whole thing onto the front of a folded piece of A4 card and waited for that to dry too.

I then lightly wrote the words on the front with pencil to make sure they all fitted in before starting sewing...

 

...and using contrasting thick thread I sewed over the letters.

And this was how it looked when I gave it to my Mum on her birthday!


PS. A Christmas post to follow soon hopefully!

How not to re-cover a vintage armchair

This is the final result of a project that began about two years ago when my kind Aunt gave me a lovely, comfortable old vintage armchair (see original upholstery below). The original colour was so vibrant and fresh, but we don't really have a lot of velvety materials in our living room, so I planned to tone it down and blend it in a bit from the moment that it crossed the threshold into our little flat, rather than having such a bold centrepiece armchair.

 

With no previous experience of re-upholstery I googled, searched, asked friends and family, and watched numerous youtube videos to work out how I should begin the project, while the poor green armchair hid under various interchangeable blankets and throws. When I felt I had some understanding of what a vast undertaking it was and the lack of specific tools I had, I decided to just go with the flow and create a sort of throw-come-cover that would have more of a relaxed appearance than proper re-upholstery would have.

I measured the surfaces of the armchair to try and work out the total amount of material I would need to cover it, and when that proved far too numerate and difficult I simply covered as much of it as I could with make-do newspaper templates, roughly worked out how much material I would need, and visited Fabrics Galore down the road for a soft-toned and neutral fabric.

 

I found a nice, reasonably priced, stone striped material, thick enough to withstand begin sat, bounced, and occasionally slept on, and proceeded to use the newspaper templates to cut sections of fabric to cover the chair.

In order to prevent any rips or tears in the fabric, I realised I needed to cover the top of the seat seperately to the seat cushion so that the material didn't move or get stretched when the chair was sat on.

With something resembling an armchair cover skeleton, I began hemming and pinning it into something more permanent and structured.

I covered the seat cushion in the fabric, positioning the seams along the edges of the cushion and leaving a gap for a zip to be inserted in case of washing emergencies if something were to be spilled (most likely by me) on it.

I lightly tacked the cover together by hand using a brightly coloured thread, then used the sewing machine to go over all the seams, and then cut away all the tacking thread.

This is a slightly cheating blog post due to the fact that I have tacked the rest of the armchair cover together by hand, but haven't yet finished sewing it together with the sewing machine. But as you can see below, it has started to resemble a completely new armchair, one that fits with the rest of the living room and only cost me the length of the material (about £15) and time (roughly 9 months)...

Paris Grey painted chairs

Over the past few months I have been building up quite a collection of dining chairs. As useful as they are for sitting on, standing on, storing and displaying things on, and generally making the place feel more homely, there are only so many that we can fit into our tiny flat. I have now conlcuded that this number is five. We have two lovely spindly ones from my mum and dad, an even spindlier one that used to belong to Jim's Grandma, and an extra, younger, chunkier one we picked up from a charity shop when the need to seat 4 people became absolutely desperate.

The latest acquisitions came from the one and only freecycle.org and were a lovely sturdy pair of wooden dining chairs:

They were painted lovely colours, but had seen better days. I wanted to make our mismatched dining chair collection feel slightly more uniform and part of the same family, so looked into painting them, or at least a few of them the same colour. I began by giving these two a good wash down in the front garden and waited for them to dry while sitting in the last bit of autumn sunshine back in September.

That morning I had dragged Jim to The Forest Bailif a beautiful interior decoration and furniture shop in Raynes Park, where I picked up a sample pot of Annie Sloane's chalk paint in Paris Grey. This composition of paint is absolutely amazing. It has a rugged appearance but soft texture to it and you don't need to sand down or prime the item you are painting before applying the chalk paint. A brilliant time saver for impatient people like me!

Having confirmed that I loved the Paris Grey - this was a mighty achievement as I am so indecisive, but loved the colour for it's name (a sentimental reminder of our trip to Paris earlier this year) and also because it goes with everything in our living/dining room - I dragged Jim to a second Annie Sloane stockist - Tomlinsons in lovely Dulwich Village, where I splashed out on a whole litre pot of the Paris Grey chalk paint and some protective clear wax.

And this was the final result, after two coats of the paint and one of the wax:

Next on the list - two more Paris Grey chairs, and possibly a purple one thrown into the mix??!

For the love of cards

It's been a while since I last posted on here, and although I would like to say that's because I have been up to lots of exciting things, more accurately, it's actually a few other people who have been up to several very exciting things all on the same day...

Saturday 20th October saw my Grandma turn 90.

 

Happy birthday Grandma!

After sending her an appliqued rabbit card earlier on in the year for Easter, I decided to recreate a similar card for her big birthday bash on Saturday.

Using a heart template pinned onto a piece of fabric I cut out the main shape.

Then I did the same with the numbers, and used blanket stitch to sew them onto the heart.

 

I then used a couple of pins to hold the heart in place on a piece of folded white card and used a basic running stitch to attach the heart so that it looked equally as neat on the inside of the card as on the front.

 

After my Grandma's party I returned home, and checking Facebook just before bed, discovered that not only had a couple of Jim's friends got engaged that day after an 8 year relationship, but so had one of my best friends and her boyfriend, after almost a similar length of time! Hooray!!

Time to get out the heart template again!

I had the idea to make the heart two different colours and then appliquing their forename initials, rather than numbers, to each side:

Ta da! Congratulations Stella and Alex and James and Emma!

 

Reborn chest of drawers

I am a member of freecycle and love to regularly browse the emails that get sent to me by people offering bits and bobs that they no longer want or need for free (check it out! uk.freecycle.org)

I recently acquired a lovely old chest of drawers through freecycle. As soon as I had collected it - with the help of Jim and the guy getting rid of it to get it in the car with all the seats folded down - and then struggled with Jim to get it up the stairs to our flat, I realised I may have not thought about the consequences of it being quite so large...

Nevertheless, we found a home for it in the corner of the living room under the telly:

I considered keeping it stained dark for a brief period, but it was in such a run down condition it needed sanding anyway and then redoing, which would have been a fair chunk of work. I set out with the intention of sanding it down and then seeing what it looked like before deciding to restain or varnish it. I took off the brass handles and put them to one side, discovering that one of the screws from one of the handles was missing in the process...I have been scouring eBay ever since to find a reasonable matching set!

Using an electric sander and some sandpaper in a few different levels of coarseness, Jim and I sanded the whole chest of drawers over the course of a couple of sunny Saturday mornings. I then wiped it down with a damp cloth.

 

This is what it now looks like. I love the natural colour and patterns within the wood, and aside from the lack of handles, I am very pleased and plan on leaving it like this. Just for protection I polished the top of the chest of drawers with wax polish to keep it from scratches and marks.

Applique, patterned circular cushion

A few years ago I realised that the doodles I had been drawing in lectures while at university and in various office meetings all had a tendancy to be circular patterns that repeated out from a centre point. I don't know what this means from a psychological point of view, but when it came to thinking up an idea for a cushion cover design for a friend's birthday present, I had a whole wealth of mini designs to draw on (yes, I kept some doodles on scraps of paper - I don't know why).

 

I began by sketching out a circular pattern on paper to see how well the shapes would fit together keeping them as simple, but as striking, as possible. Next, I drew and cut out some sturdier cardboard templates of the three main shapes that would make up the repeating pattern and used them to cut out several of each shape in different coloured fabrics.

 

I pinned the shapes onto a piece of plain cotton to form the main cover. With a rough idea of the size of the pattern, I bought a round cushion pad, and then cut round the shapes on the fabric to the size of the cushion and cut one other piece the same size for the back of the cover, leaving about 2 inches round each edge for the hem. (Unfortunately, it turned out that the cover needed to be smaller than I'd originally anticipated in order to make the cushion inside fit in a nice, padded way, so I had to remove the outer two rings of shapes...)

Using blanket stitch, I sewed each shape in place onto the fabric by hand. Then I pinned the front and back parts of the cover together face to face and sewed them together with the sewing machine, leaving a gap of about 20cm to fit the cushion into when it was turned the right way out.

Finally, I squeezed the cushion pad into the cover and sewed up the remaining gap by hand.

And there you have one slightly wonky, circular, patterned cushion!

Summery duvet cover

With all the greay rainy weather we've had this summer, I've had a fair bit of time to get stuck into some indoor projects, including sewing a new duvet cover and matching cushion covers.

The fabric shop round the corner were selling this fabric at a ridiculous price (I think it was about £2 a metre) so I couldn't say no really, and I'd bought the remnants of the roll before I even knew what I was going to do with it.

I measured the length of one of our other duvet covers and realised that although I had more than enough in length, the width of the fabric wasn't wide enough to match the width of the duvet cover. So, I measured the difference, divided it by two and cut two strips to add down each side to make up the width on both the front and back of the cover.

I pinned all sections together face to face (inside out) on the top ad both sides of the cover, making sure that the main underside bit of fabric was slightly longer than all other sections in order to sew it folded back on itself as pocket to hold the duvet inside. I haven't decided whether I'm going to attach buttons yet.

For the cushions, I measured the cover cases I already had, folded the remaining material into quarters, pinned them all together, measured out the cover dimensions (including 1.5cm extra for the seam) and marked them on the underside of the material with a pencil.

Then I carefully cut out the four rectangles, pinned two sections together face to face, and used the sewing machine to sew the two long and one of the short sides, before turning the covers the right way out. I then folded in about 5cm of the remining ends, pinned them and inserting the cushions.

With the cushion pads in, I then pinned the fourth ends closed, and used a simple stitch to sew them closed.

First foray into furniture rejuvination

Our neighbours over the road have been doing up their flat with extreme commitment and devotion over the past couple of weeks. Yes, I have been spying on them from our first floor flat living room window.

It all began when I noticed the couple knocking down the lovely, old, metal railing fence around their front garden, and replacing it with a wooden picket fence, which they proceeded to paint baby blue (gasp). Yes, baby blue. At first I was horrified, but they have since colour co-ordinated their front door and added some lovely little windowsill faux bushes in pretty white pots and I can now say, peering judgementally from our living room window, that it looks quite quaint (and much more adventurous than our pair of window boxes, packed with dead, dying, and general reject plants from Homebase).

On one spying occasion I noticed them removing a large collection of furniture, old plants, pictures and upholstery from their flat and leaving it on the pavement as rubbish. Having the thrifty, "waste not want not", "make do and mend" attitude that I do, I scurried downstairs and across the road to see what I could salvage. With the help of Jim - who mostly does always have better things to do, but I asked nicely - we managed to sneakily rescue an old home-made coffee table and a large, heavy, eclectic gold and red wooden mirror:

Both items had seen better days, and were painted/ stained in dark dreary colours, that would do nothing for our tiny, shoebox flat (apart from the mirror which generally will be quite good at splashing light around and making the living room seem a tad larger!)

I set to work washing the mirror and table down with some mildly soapy water and an old sponge to get rid of dust and dirt, and used an old knife to get trickier marks off, and then let them dry completely. It might have been sensible to sand down the furniture a bit, but I thought as it is not going to be used outside and none of it was varnished, a few layers of fresh paint would stick well enough to the exsiting paint.

There was a small selection of paint pots left in the flat when we moved in nearly three years ago, none of which has had a chance to be used until now. I picked a fairly safe looking Dulux pot in "Egyptian Cotton" and prised the lid off with a screw driver expecting to find algae and frogspawn inside, but with a quick stir the paint looked as good as new.

I gave the table and mirror three coats of the Egyptian Cotton each, lettign each layer dry completely (over night) before applying the next.

When finished and all dry, I was more pleased with the resulting white/cream colour of the paint on the furniture than the yellowy white colour that the paint pot depicted. Also, the carving on the mirror frame was still visible under three layers of paint, which I had been worried about disappearing.

I had fun playing around with the position of the table, which goes well with the neutral and pale scheme of our living room, but I have yet to find a home for the mirror as we already have at least one large mirror in every room!

Happy painting!