Design - an apple for the teacher

Yay!  Beetroot Press tea-towel: 'An Apple for the Teacher', made it onto the Folksy; Gifts for teachers.  Have a look here.  It's hand printed with silk screens onto linen fabric.  The inks are water-based so are eco-friendly and linen is a sustainable textile.  It's £15 on my Folksy or Etsy pages.

The Folksy page also shows lots of other great hand-made gifts that you could buy for your teacher for  an end of year leaving present.

 

Love - ferm

I love this Danish homeware company:  Ferm Living.  Bold and quirky prints in delicious colour palettes with different styles to choose from.  Selling:  Bedding, wallpaper, living accessories, kitchen accessories and wall stickers.  They started off as a design agency and now design cute homeware.  To find out more about the company visit here.

They also have a 'How to' wallpaper your dolls house with mini wallpapers to download to decorate your dolls house with!

 

Elle éléphant cushion

 Other friends to collect.

'In the Rain' pillowcase.

 'Mountain Friends' wallpaper.

 

Grown up home accessories.  'Spear' vase and bowl.

Mushroom soup wallpaper!

Copenhagen tea towel.

Design - summer florals

Hi everyone.  To forget the rain and brighten your day I have added some designs that I worked on a couple of weeks ago to update my portfolio.  Have a look here if you want to see the rest.

I drew this design in the garden, on a sunny day, a couple of weeks ago.

This is a re-colour of an older pattern I did.  Loving the fresh colours!

Bicycles and flowers, what more could you want in summer (apart from the sun).

I love this Moth print, I drew this in the garden too.  I sketched the outlines and then coloured and arranged in Illustrator.

 This design was inspired by some vintage fabric my Mum had lying around the house.

Make it - jubilee bunting

Here's the bunting I made and hung on the front and side of our home.  I would have taken more pictures of other neighbour's bunting if it hadn't been for the rain tipping down!  It looks so pretty, I have to take it down today.

Smaller bunting above our door.

Larger bunting on the side of the barn.

Make it - very last minute recycled bunting

So as a VERY last minute thing, I decided to make some Jubilee bunting today.  It's slightly jubilee-ish as it's red white and blue, and made from patterned fabrics so you could use it for anything afterwards.

 I only made a short length to go above the door, so you could make it in a couple of hours.

You will need:  Paper scissors, fabric scissors, card (or paper could work), pencil, ruler,  piping, red white and blue fabrics (or any colour if you aren't making for the jubilee), sewing machine, matching coloured cotton thread.

1.  Cut out the triangle size you would like for your bunting: To make it an even triangle, make sure the bottom point of the triangle is central to the top, horizontal, line of the triangle.

2.  Once you have the triangle the size you like, trace it onto another piece of card, then flip it over, leaving a 1cm gap in between the 2, and trace again so you have a diamond shape, then use the ruler to draw a 1cm margin all the way around your diamond shape (this is for the hem when you sew it up).

 3.  Use paper scissors to cut out the diamond (around the extra edge just added).  

4.  Now iron your fabric, so that when you cut out your diamond shapes they will be exactly the same.  I just placed the diamond card shape on the fabric and cut around with the fabric scissors.  Do this with all of your bunting triangles.  I made 10 triangles in total but depends on how big you want the triangles and how long you want the bunting to be.   The bigger the triangles, the quicker you'll get there!

5.  Next iron all of your hems inside.  They should be 1cm wide.

6.  Then fold your diamond in half, so the hems are inside, and you will see your bunting triangles are shaping up!

7.  Lay out your bunting triangles on the floor, or table, to work out what order you would like them to sit on the piping.

8.  Once you have decided on your order, place the piping inside the triangles at the top where the fold is.

9.  Pin the triangles down, so that the points at the bottom meet, and hold it in place on the piping. 

10.  Use the piping foot on your sewing machine and sew along the piped section first.  You may want to change thread colours for each triangle.  I found the easiest way was to sew all the cream first, then sew all the red, then the blue last.

11.  Once you finish sewing along the piping at the top, turn the fabric and continue to sew down the triangle side to the bottom point, turn and sew up the other side.

NB:  I found the bottom point is quite tricky to sew, so I snipped off the ends slightly and turned up the points inside and continued to sew.  You may need to go slow as the fabric will be thickest here.

12.  Continue to sew all the triangles in the same way.

13.  Tie off all the loose threads.

Ta dah!  some cute bunting to join in with the festivities.  Hope you all have a good time this bank holiday if you are celebrating or just chilling out!

I am going to try and hang this outside tomorrow so will post some more pictures and I'm making some bigger bunting as I've got the bunting bug now.