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!

St Patrick's Day Decorations

I LOVE St Patrick's Day. Not just because I'm married to a 'Plastic Paddy' (for those of you new to the term, it means one who was born outside of Ireland, but to Irish parents and considers the Emerald Isle to be Home with a capital H!) but because I love the colour green and I love any excuse to decorate and be silly. Oh and it's a reason to base some excitable drinking and singing, which is always good in my book!

You may remember last year, I wrote a post introducing some new, limited edition items to my store:

These two are still available in my Etsy Shop until the end of March.

I've not managed to add to the St Patrick's Range this year, but I have created a Lucky Shamrocks tutorial for the lovely folk over at Felt Makes Magazine

There are loads of cool things to make in this quarterly magazine, so it's well worth having a look at!

Hope you have a wonderful Paddy's Day and...... Enjoy the Craic!

Happy St Patrick's Day!

Top O'The Morning To Ye All :-)

Hope you've all had/are having a lovely St Patrick's Day weekend if you celebrate it! What with my husband being Irish (well a Plastic Paddy) we usually manage to celebrate pretty well, but this year there was a distinct lack of planning for a night out and also our babysitter wasn't available, so we decided that we'd stay in last night (Saturday) and maybe go out for a pint of the black stuff at lunch time today with the kids - they like the pub as they know it means crisps to keep them quiet for a bit!

We also both suffered disappointment in the Rugby yesterday - although Ireland didn't win the Wooden Spoon they lost their match to Italy, which somewhat upset my hubby and then England not only lost very badly to Wales but it also meant we didn't get the Grand Slam :-( I spent 80 minutes howling at the TV and ended the evening a rather unhappy bunny!

BUT today is another day, so with all that behind us, we're going to enjoy looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

I found this CUTE image whilst searching for a pot of gold - click here for the shop link

I haven't got much that I can share with you about what I've been working on this week as the main commission I've had is something for one of my lovely customers for another one of my lovely customers! So until it's handed over and ooooh'd and aaahhh'd over I can't show you!

I'll be linking this up to Handmade Monday as usual and will leave you with one final image

St Patrick's Day Parade

Today I'm revealing the first in the line up for the St Patrick's Day parade here at Grace's Favours HQ:

He's been made to the same dimensions and exacting standard as our normal Campervans, but he comes with a removable Shamrock Top Hat Brooch:

I've been trying to take some more interesting, lifestyle type shots, but I'm not sure I've got it quite right yet...

There will be some more entrants to the parade next week and hopefully my photo styling will continue to improve!

To buy this lovely fella, pop over to the shop

Too early to be thinking about St Patrick's Day?

Photo courtesy of Luxpresso.com

Happy New Year!

I hope you've all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year - any sore heads out there today? I'm feeling a little delicate after a great evening at our place with some good friends, homemade curry (well, as the diet started today we thought last night should be a decent blow out!) and lots of yummy wine, champagne, toffee vodka and Baileys!

So as with all good hangovers, we've been talking about future plans and the usual resolutions and I started thinking about all the exciting things I can do with my business now that I am able to dedicate all my energies (when not being a wife, parent, housekeeper, chauffeur, cook, cleaner.... you get the picture?!) to it.

So I started thinking about Valentine's and St Patrick's Days... I think I will plan some new product lines which have the same items at their centre, but each will focus on the different celebration... so far I am thinking about VW Campervans and VW Beetles as the central items - they are certainly some of my best sellers, but I was also thinking about Mini Coopers and possibly Morris Minors.

Photo courtesy of Skybluefreelance.info

Photo courtesy of Classicandperformancecar.com

What other vehicles do you think would work well in felt?

The lovely thing about the car/campervan range is that they can be personalised, which is great for gift giving and they're a bit different which thankfully seems to appeal to folk!

Anyway, right now I have to get my house guests up (for the second time - they've all had to retire to bed for the afternoon!) and find something for my kids to eat for dinner.... ahhhh the life of a working mum :-)