Grace's Favours - Craft Adventures

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)

Friday, 6 February 2015

Crafting for the Six Nations

It's that time of year again... Six Nations time, which in our house is very contentious - the husband is Irish, I'm English and the kids were born in Wales!

So I've made a few different things 6 Nations related over the years:

Shamrocks for the Irish fans

Daffodils for the Welsh

English Roses for the best team ;-)

And finally a leek!

The leek was part of my felt food exploration earlier in the week (all of which turned out faaaar too large!) A friend saw it and asked if she could buy it to wave during the Wales games!! Her husband was very bemused when he picked it up earlier... All he'd been told was there was something to collect... He wasn't expecting a leek!

Need to try and create a thistle next for the Scots :-D

Monday, 2 February 2015

How to find a truly personalised gift

We have a friend who's 40th Birthday is coming up and I asked my husband yesterday what we should get him for his birthday, to which my husband replied "What do you get the man who has everything?"

A very good point. We quite often have presents to get for people who have a high disposable income (lucky things!) and who buy the things they want as they see them... makes for a difficult pursuit looking for the ideal present.

Well I've had some customers who have tackled that by having something truly personalised created for their loved ones:

This Supreme Dalek Figure was made for one lovely customer's 40th Birthday as he's a real Dr Who fan!

The Supreme Dalek Toy my version was based on.

Another customer wanted a large Subaru Impreza Car Cushion to give to her son as he was having to sell his beloved pride & joy due to an expanding family!

Felt Subaru Impreza Car Cushion (Complete with personalised number plates)

Having seen the Personalised London Bus that I sell a great number of, asked if I could make a New York City Bus, with personalised plates:

New York City Bus, based on the photos sent by the customer

A completely lovely, but puppy-crazy friend and wonderful customer asked me to replicate her two Chinese Crested Powder Puff dogs in cushion form:

Holly & Noodle - the gorgeous puppies who got their own cushions... they were supposed to be for their owner, but they both claimed their cushion and refused to be parted!!

Finally, the first real custom item I was asked to create, was this enhanced VW Beetle, known as a Baja Bug and used for off-roading, requested by a customer in Germany for her brother, who had once owned this car:

Hope you enjoyed that little round up and feel free to contact me if there is something wild and wacky that you'd like to see immortalised in felt!

Sunday, 1 February 2015

Fairies and Elves

Hey lovelies,

I've been having a bit of a blogging writers block recently, mainly I think because I wanted to up my blogging game this year... so immediately my mind goes blank!!

But I did want to share these gorgeous Fairies and Elves doors that a friend of ours made for the kids.

I'm so chuffed with them and the kids adore them. Simon (the lovely friend who made them) is hoping to set up an Etsy shop, so watch this space if you like the look of them.

Tuesday, 13 January 2015

Resolution #1 - Bloglovin

I've decided that 2015 is going to be the year I get my blogging act together.

To that end, I'm trying to be more pro-active with using Bloglovin.

If you click on the link below you can follow my blog through Bloglovin.

To be honest I'm not entirely sure where we go from there... but as I find out I will come back and update this post!

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Thursday, 8 January 2015

Recent Creations

Happy New Year!

I know, I'm a little late with the greeting, but I've been a little busy.

I had a flurry of orders over Christmas, which was lovely, but as I was taking a break from work, it meant when I came back to it this week, I had a full on timetable.

So I just wanted to share with you a couple of recent creations and then I'd best get back to it. Hoping to get a tutorial written up next week or the week after (Tax Return avoidance!)

George Pig Hand Puppet

Penguin Hand Puppet

Yoda Hand Puppet

Fiat 600 Hanging Ornaments

Felt Angel Christmas Tree Topper

Monday, 22 December 2014

VAT Rule Changes - VATMOSS and how it will affect Small Businesses

As some of you will already know the EU are changing the VAT (Value Added Tax) rules for Digital Products on the 1st January 2015.

This has proven to be a very complicated change, which means that instead of the VAT being dependent on where the seller is based, the VAT will now be charged at the local rate of the buyer. So if I am based in the UK and I sell to a customer in the UK, I would only charge VAT if my turnover was more than £81,000 (I wish!!) as that is the threshold for the UK. However some countries within the EU do not have a VAT threshold, so as soon as I make even 1 digital sale to someone in an EU country with no threshold (such as Spain or Sweden) I would have to pay VAT on that product.

Not only does this mean that I would be losing out on income, as some of all my EU sales would have to go to the VAT Man, but it is also unbelievably complicated in terms of filing a tax return, the amount of data that needs to be collected and stored about each sale and then there are the dispute issues, such as what if a customer lives in one EU country, but is travelling and makes a purchase whilst in another EU country?

HMRC does not have answers to these questions yet. The likes of Etsy & Craftsy do not have answers to these questions yet. It's nearly the end of December and time is running out to get answers.

SO.

I had decided that I would simply stop selling digital patterns on the 31st December 2014, which is a real shame as that was the direction I was trying to push my business towards. It would mean that I cannot grow my business in the way I want to.

However. I have just this morning discovered this from HMRC:

Examples of electronic supplies and whether or not they are ‘digital services’

Service	E-service?	Electronically supplied?	Covered by the new rules
Pdf document manually e-mailed by seller	Yes	No	No
Pdf document automatically e-mailed by seller’s system	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pdf document automatically downloaded from site	Yes	Yes	Yes
Stock photographs available for automatic download	Yes	Yes	Yes
Live webinar	No	No	No
On-line course consisting of pre-recorded videos and downloadable pdfs	Yes	Yes	Yes
On-line course consisting of pre-recorded videos and downloadable pdfs plus support from a live tutor	Yes	No	No
Individually commissioned content sent in digital form e.g. photographs, reports, medical results	Yes	No	No
Link to online content or download sent by manual e-mail	Yes	Yes	Yes

So this does mean that my Craftsy and Pattern Mart shops will have to close on the 31st December 2014 as they do not currently support anything other than automatic downloads.

But the good news is that you will still be able to purchase patterns from my Etsy shop as I will simply be removing the automatic download option and will email the pattern out, in PDF format after it has been purchased.

This means only a tiny bit more work for me, but luckily no increased cost for you or me! Yay!

It's not an ideal solution, but it is a workable solution for now.

If you want to read more about this subject, Rosie Slosek's Blog One Man Band Accounting is very informative and full of useful info and tips on how you can help make a difference.

Wednesday, 17 December 2014

Christmas Inspiration from Pinterest

Now, we all know how much I adore whiling away hours on Pinterest, looking up cool new things to make... and usually, like most people, I pin away and never actually find the time to make things!

But this year I promised myself it would be different... so when I found some fun and easy pins, I made time to make them too....

What do you think? I don't think I failed too badly ;-)

Source - Pinterest

My version

Source - Pinterest

My version, with more candy canes and a sack full of chocolate presents!

Source - Pinterest

My version (please excuse all the kids artwork - the mirror is in their playroom!)

I had so many others that I wanted to try out, like these:

Source - Pinterest

And this one:

Source - Pinterest

But as usual at this time of year, I have totally run out of time.

I'd love to see some of the creative things you've made for Christmas, especially if they were inspired by something you've seen on Pinterest!

Wednesday, 3 December 2014

Christmas VW Cuddly Campervan Giveaway... And the Winner Is.......!

Thank you to everyone who entered the Cuddly VW Christmas Camper Giveaway:

And the Winner is......

Well done Joanne :-D

I'm sorry that you couldn't all win, but I will do another giveaway in the New Year - maybe a sewing kit... watch this space!

Wednesday, 26 November 2014

Christmas VW Campervan Giveaway!!!

As I mentioned in my last post (somewhat belatedly!) I should have run this giveaway at the beginning of October :-/

Still... better late than never, right?!

Here's what's up for grabs - A Christmassy VW Cuddly Campervan!

I will post worldwide and the giveaway will run until the 3rd December (just in case someone from New Zealand wins as that is the last posting date for NZ from the UK!) and I would love as many shares & shout-outs as y'all can manage!

Here's the entry bit:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Confessions of a Craftaholic!

I have a confession.

It's not a life-altering, want to hang my head in shame kinda confession (I'm sorry - if that's what you were hoping for, there might be racier blogs for you than this one!)

It's an 'Ooops, I was planning something and I totally forgot all about it' kinda confession!

I have just passed, well actually Grace's Favours has just passed it's 3rd Birthday! Whoop!

Which means, the giveaway I was going to hold to celebrate my/our Birthday didn't happen.

Bums.

I wanted to do one on the scale of the other Giveaways I've held - like the Rainbow one or the Christmas Wreath one.

However, to make up for it... I thought I'd run an 'It's now the end of November, which means nearly Christmas Giveaway'!

Soooo.... how would you like to win A Merry Christmas Cuddly Campervan???

The giveaway post will go live within the next couple of hours... keep your eyes peeled!

Wednesday, 19 November 2014

Wordless Wednesday - Lettering Tutorials

Source - Wee Folk Studio

Source - Pinterest

Source - Better Homes & Gardens

Source - Pinterest

Thursday, 13 November 2014

Christmas Crafty Tutorial Link Up

Yesterday I posted a Christmassy Tutorial - A Mini Teddy Bed as part of Laura (Lupin) Howards' Crafty Tutorial Link Up:

And today I've got the other bloggers' makes to show to you too.

If you click on the links below that will take you directly to the individual blogs with their tutorials.