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!

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!

 

Sparkly greetings cards

  

 

Mother's Day bunting greetings cards

So here is an idea that I sneakily took inspiration from the AllAboutYou website for:

It is a simple greetings card made from a white A4 piece of card folded in half with fabric bunting glued/stitched on to give a spring-like, celebratory feeling.

I began by sorting through my scrap material collection and picking out coloured bits small enough not to be used for anything else more substantial, but large enough to cut out uniform triangle shapes using a cardboard template:

I then lightly glued six contrasting triangles onto a folded piece of white A4 card, corner to corner, in the shape of celebratory bunting hung up in a row.

When this was 100% dry, I used the sewing machine to sew a running stitch across the top of the bunting triangles, where string would be hanging them up in reality:

Your card is now ready to be written and sent to your mum! Or, if you make more than one, it's a fun idea to tie a set of cards together with some string or ribbon and give them as a gift - on this Sunday or any other time of the year!

Love you mummy!