Welcome to my little corner of the blogosphere to share the ups and downs of starting a craft business, with plenty of tips, mishaps and the odd glass of wine!

Sunday 29 March 2015

Easter Wreath Giveaway

I've been wanting to hold a giveaway for Easter for a couple of weeks, but I've been so crazy busy that it's only just happened!

So here's the VW Campervan Easter Mini Wreath that is up for grabs this week:


It's only open to UK residents due to the timescales (i.e. if I post it on April 1st it won't get to you by Easter weekend if you live abroad - I'm sorry but I promise the next giveaway will be worldwide)

So all you have to do is head over to the Grace's Favours Facebook Page and like & comment on the picture to enter.

If you don't have a Facebook account, feel free to leave a message on this Blog post and I'll add you into the draw at the end.

Good luck & I'll be back to announce the winner after 12noon on Wednesday 1st April.

Tuesday 10 March 2015

How to: Easy No Sew St Patrick's Day Shamrock Garlands

Now you may remember that we rather like St Patrick's Day in our house, for a couple of reasons... firstly our son is called Patrick and secondly because my husband, Brian is Irish, so we usually go to town with dressing up and a bit of decorating the house:



So this year I thought I'd show you how to make a very easy, no sew St Patrick's Day Shamrock Garland:



You will need:
Felt in different shades of Green – You can use as many or few as you like, I used these 5 shades:
Dark Green, Emerald Green, Mint Green, Light Green and Jade Green
Shamrock templates
Black biro
Pins
Scissors
Small lengths of ribbon

Needle and matching green thread

Instructions:

Cut out the templates. Then double up the felt, so you are working with 2 layers at a time. Pin the templates to the 2 layers of felt and draw around the templates with the black biro


Remove the templates and then cut out your shamrock shapes. I did two of each sized template in each colour.

Once you’ve done this for all 3 templates you should have 30 shamrocks cut out


If like mine your felt is a bit wrinkled you can iron it flat. Place the felt on the ironing board and cover with a piece of muslin or a thin tea towel and then iron (you can use quite a hot setting this way, but if you don’t use the muslin/tea towel you will have the felt stuck to your iron!)
Use your scissors to snip a thin horizontal cut into one of the shamrocks – Make sure you don’t make the cut too wide or the stalk of the next shamrock will fall out


Then thread another shamrock stem through the hole and repeat at the top of the second shamrock. Mix and match the colours and the sizes throughout your garlands.

Once you have a string of shamrocks as long as you’d like (mine were 10 shamrocks per string, so I made 3 separate strings) sew one of the pieces of ribbon in a loop to the back of the top shamrock


Then hang and admire!




I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial - if you make any St Patrick's Day Garlands I'd love to see some pictures!

Happy Paddy's Day!

Thursday 5 March 2015

Softies as curtain tie backs

Hello... I'm back :-) Did you miss me? What do you mean you hadn't noticed?!?! Harrumph! (If you've been following me on Facebook you'll know I've been without Internet access for a while!)

Anyway.... A customer has asked me to create some curtain tie backs for his little one's bedroom and the first set I've created are these blue donkeys (which may or may not pass a glancing resemblance to a well known miserable donkey...!):




I think these might be one of my favourite creations of all time!!

I'm gearing up to go for Take Two on the little pink piggy friend now... he's proving much harder to get the right look!

I'm going to link this up to the 6 Weeks of LOVE for Softies Series over at Sew Mama Sew The hastag for finding all the spectacual softies on social media (i.e. Facebook, Flickr and Instagram) is #6weeksofsofties

You can see the other entries on the Sew Mama Sew website here

You can enter up to 3 different softies over the 6 weeks and there are some wonderful prizes to be had (although the main prize is only up for grabs in the US and Canada, but the others are worldwide)

Sharing Buttons