Pirates Ahoy! More Pirate Patterns - Pirate Treasure Map

Ahem. I know you probably all think that it's me that's the pirate addict in our house, but I promise it's not - it really is Patrick, actually and Seren... Oh go on then, and ME!

We all love Pirates and a while ago I was badgered to make Patrick a Treasure Map:

This was to go with his Pirate Sword (tutorial here) and his Pirate Eye Patch (tutorial here)

And after a slight time lapse (good intentions and all that!)....... I have finally made the Treasure Map into a PDF pattern which can be bought from my Etsy Shop here

Whilst creating this pattern I discovered that by fantastic coincidence the lovely Abby Glassenburg, who writes the gorgeous blog While She Naps was also creating a Pirate Pattern - for Roger the Pirate, a soft doll, who looks SO much fun! You can buy the pattern from Abby's website here and how cute is he?!

Picture by Abby Glassenburg - While She Naps

I think as soon as my two see this chappie, I'll be dispatched to make them both one of these too!

Teaching Pre-School Sewing

Just a quickie today as I'm putting together a Christmas in July Tutorial (I know - seems FAAAAAAR too early to think about Christmas!!)

But last week and the week before I went into my son's nursery class to teach them some sewing - they LOVED making their creations. (You may remember that I did this last year with my daughter when she was in the pre-school class)

The first week was quite simple, they just sewed a heart onto a background using a simple running stitch:

I then added their names, using a sharper needle as I'd had to punch holes in the felt for the kids to sew using plastic needles.

The the following week they made piggie finger puppets, which they LOVED doing and according to all the Mums & Dads, they were incredibly proud of their puppets, which made my heart sing!

Patrick's Girlfriend :-)

Just like his Mummy, Sewing & Chatting!!

Can't caption the two pics above, but they are Patrick's best friend and his girlfriend!! It's SO cute how much these 4 love each other!

Anyway, I digress.... for the pig finger puppets, I made up the faces & ears and punch the holes in the puppets and then the kids sewed them up, using plastic needles again and with a whip stitch (mostly!!)

What's also really fantastic is that the nursery owners have asked me to go back next year, when I won't have any children at the nursery! Will be so nice as this age are SO excited to be doing new things and show such joy when they do it well!

Now.... for me, back to Christmas decorations!!

Monsters in the Workshop!

Well, after thinking that I was all set for my workshop and that I couldn't be any more prepared after doing so much last week, I was totally thrown today by two of my students (both 11 year olds) asking to make monsters! I had to think on my feet with this request and luckily both were brimming with immagination, as you can see:

Pretty scary looking beasts!

Thankfully, so that I don't have nightmares for the next week, my other two students (both adults!) wanted to make slightly prettier things:

The flower is going to be an embellishment for a bag and the owl on purple background will be a bag, but the lady making it has arthritis so couldn't go as fast as she'd have liked!

All in all though a very satisfactory session and a nice way to end the run - this was the 6th one I've done this term and I'm taking a break now till May as we've got almost all our weekends jam packed with friends coming to stay, going away ourselves, a play to perform, a hen weekend and a wedding! Phew, now I think about it, I might need a stint at an eastern meditation retreat to get over all of that!

Workshops & Elephant in Progress

After a nice positive set of comments about my first blog post (and fortified by a large glass of wine!) I thought I'd offer another. This week has been all about workshops & an elephant in progress.

The workshop I actually only ran today, but I've spent most of the week preparing for it. Given that my first series of workshops were billed as being 'felting classes' when they were actually sewing with felt, I had a mixed reception (although all of it very polite!) So this time round I asked Babs from Zigzags (in Coleford, where the classes are run) to make it quite clear that these classes were for those fairly new to sewing or children as it's more about the sewing, than the felt, the felt just happens to be the medium we're working in. I realised if I had more young people or those very new to sewing in the class, I'd need to be really organised and prepared, so all week I've been making a range of templates, photocopying and making lists of required materials for each item. Phew.

So today the class ran, and I'm glad I was so prepared... although it wasn't that busy, the participants were all in need of quite a lot of attention, so it wouldn't have been easy otherwise!

One thing they were quite keen to see was the elephant that I've been working on this week:

I'm not quite sure what to do with this little guy... he could be another brooch, but I sort of like the idea of turning him into some wall art (maybe framed) this could just be because I am additcted to elephants (espcialy Indian ones, like this chap!) and have a LOT of them framed on my walls. Given that I'm at a drama rehearsal tonight (I'm part of the local Am-Dram group) I've still got a bit of time to make my mind up.

I've got a few things that I've been asked to create by a couple of my lovely customers... an owl cushion is first up so I'm going to have fun designing that today in my lunch break (at the day job!) and then we're moving onto a Miffy inspired rabbit, so watch this space later in the week for photos. Have a good Monday everyone xxx

PS. The owls (from my previous post) are now available in my Etsy shop

Owl Brooches - a cute gift for Mother's Day

Hello? Is there anybody there?

Okay, well I'll assume there's hundreds of avid readers already (hey, a girl can dream, right?) and plough on! So for those of you who know me you'll know that Grace's Favours started last August (2011) and whilst it has not quite gone viral in that time (we've ascertained that I'm prone to the odd daydream already!), it's not doing badly at all and I thought a blog would be a nice addition.

So for my first post I thought I'd tell you about these owl brooches, which are a new line for the shop, just created this week and about to go up onto the etsy shop www.etsy.com/shop/gracesfavours and I think they would make a fab Mother's Day gift, which is of course just round the corner here in the UK (18th March)

What do you think of these little fellas? They can be made in any colour scheme, I think of the 3 so far the blue one is my favourite!



I created them because I needed a thank you present for a lovely member of staff at my childrens' nursery, who left on Wednesday and another lovely member of staff at the nursery who turned 21 at the weekend (so young... I think I vaguely remember turning 21!!). They were really fun to come up with and I love the way they each seem to have their own little personality!

Okay, I suppose now I'd better get on with listing these little critters onto the shop and try to stop my 3 year old daughter (Seren) from emptying out the entire contents of my sewing box onto the floor in an attempt to find something interesting to play with!