Super San Valentino!

(Wow this picture came out pretty tiny.....hmmm) WELL, anyway...i hope you had a lovely "Giorno di Valentino"! I certainly did.....SuperD revelled in the opportunity to exploit his culinary expertise with an awesome smoked salmon risotto and I revelled in the opportunity to use the occasion for CRAFT! woohoo!

The hanging heart pockets were made in a matter of seconds from squares of red card (see Martha Stewart for details). The red napkins were stamped up with little kiss-prints (no i did not "ink" my own lips...they're from a stamp kit from tesco) and floating hearts (hand carved). The red crochet hearts, which were really fun to make, were made from this crochet hearts tutorial.

The card was super fun to sew but i will be keeping my eye on it because i've thought of something cool that i could make by re-using those buttons!!! haha!

Hope you had a nice romantic (and crafty) one too!!

love, love LOVE you!!!

junespoon

xxx

magnet multiplication

This craft is toooooo easy!! For details see pimp your pinboard

Anything goes when choosing fabric for the magnets, for some of these i stamped fabric ink onto the material with hand-carved stamps (extremely easy to do, all you need is a craft knife and a simple white rubber eraser, more details will follow in another post)

I'm going to need a lot more metallic surfaces!!

a festive forager! (lol)

Haha...could my post title be any more contrived...i think not!! Thinking of cheesy things to write in the title box could be my favourite part of blogging...hehe!

This is the cake that i made for my piccolo riccio, or "riccino" as i like to call him...aka SuperD



I wasn't going to post this one...i mean the last thing the internet needs is another picture of a hedgehog cake......but he actually disappeared so quickly from the plate that i had forgotten what he looked like and thought he deserved to live on in cyberspace since his life in "house of spoon" was so tragically short! (and tragically delicious...mmmmm!!!)

Game on!!

Well...i did say i'd post the pic of the re-engineered scrabble board soon, so here it is.

I tried a number of times to measure the squares on a scrabble board and simply rule the grid out, but was foiled repeatedly as the squares are actually not even the same size...grrrr! So in the end I traced 2 rows of squares onto acetate, cut them out with a craft knife and just used it as a stencil to draw the squares in pencil onto the table. I tried to stencil with paint directly but the fact that the lines between the squares are so narrow meant that i kept getting leakage from one square to the next....aka a smudgey mess.



Anyway, i decided to give up and painted each square by hand. I painted red boxes for the little tile holders which had been painted pillar-box RED by SuperD.

You can take my word for it that the table looks pretty cool with mugs of tea and biscotti on it, but to see it in its full "game-ready-glory" see below! The little tile bag was made in a different post (http://houseofspoon.blogspot.com/2009/02/hows-game-goinits-in-bag.html)

it's a frog's life..

This is almost a post of a retro-craft because i began this little frog about a month ago, (see this frog pattern) when i had decided to get back into crochet but had forgotten how to do it!!! it's true what they say, everything new you learn pushes something else out of your brain...usually in my case that's useless nonsense such as electrochemical principles or "how to change a flat tyre" etc (who needs that knowledge when you have a mobile phone and a husband to call?)

but sometimes it is crucial stuff like craft techniques...so be warned!


Anyway, i finished him off just recently and i'm glad because he is earning his keep, hard at work keeping my garden pest population under control...at least that's what he tells me......sometimes i begin to doubt him and think that he is actually just slacking off, hanging out in my garden on his favourite stone, telling himself stories while the bugs abound....but when i march outside to read the riot act, i look him right in the eyes and begin to feel sleeeepy.....veeeery sleeeepy......."yesssss yooou're dooooing aaa goooood joooooob mr frooooog, yessss iiii doooo waaaant tooo get yoooou sooome moooore choooocolate biiiscuits"

Uh-oh...stencil fever

Yikes!!!!

Stencilling is seriously addictive...i literally had to force myself to stop! I guess that explains all those houses you visit where there is a different stencilling border round the top of every wall and on all the furniture etc....it is seriously fun (and super-simple) to do!!!!

I just made acetate templates cut out with a stanley knife and sponged regular paint on top with a piece of torn of packaging sponge. Easy-peasy!!

The writing is an extract from a bible verse "Signore, non sappiamo che fare, ma gli occhi nostri sono su di te" ("Lord, we don't know what to do, but our eyes are on you") refecting the fact that we can never know what is the right step to take, but God does and we'll wait for him to speak before we step out in faith, leaning on his promise.

SuperD made a simple wooden crate-style drawer for my cream wrought iron unit to house our motorbike helmets and other unsightly stuff that would otherwise clutter up the hallway! I then sponged it with the same template as the stairway.

I love when life "matches" (...or mismatches in a cool way)

faith, love, hope and enLIGHTenment!

SuperD decided to make something with a bit of meaning behind it...i can't say i don't know how he feels...it is so fulfilling to express through craft!! ....ahem....anyway, enough of my craft-philosophy and back to the post....

He made a candleholder with a trinity of sides, on a circular plain wooden base, symbolising a triune God and the earth, respectively.

This side symbolises faith, around God as the centre. It's in the shape of a cross as the basis of the faith we possess.

This side is love, heart in the centre with ripples reaching out above. The shape at the base

This side is hope, the spirit of hope in the shape of a butterfly suspended between the earth below, as expressed in egyptian hyroglyphics at the bottom, and the heavens above as expressed by the starry sky.


So when we light the candle we can remember how we too have been enlightened!

pimp your pinboard

You know what are boring? Big white ugly plastic magnets like I got free with my magnetic pinboard....YUCK!!

And why would you keep them around when making your own magnet covers is sooooo easy? You are correct, there is no reason. Because i didn't want to shell out and buy a button-making kit, which automates much of this process....i had to do it this way.....

Things you need:
* a stiff cardboard circle, the size of the final magnet cover (if you can't get very stiff cardboard just use a couple of layers of thinner stuff)
* a material circle, diameter just less than twice that of the cardboard circle (try to use a dense fibred material that will not fray easily at the edges, it's a lot easier!)
* a little piece of quilt batting or generic stuffing
* a piece of felt in a complimentary colour (the same size as the cardboard circle
*imagination
*large mug of tea (you may not need this, but i did!)

First thing to do is to embroider (or draw) something fun onto the material circle. I used my machine for the letters and he is obviously in a huff with me at the minute and is therefore unable to sew in a straight line...groan. Run medium sized, evenly spaced stitches by hand around the outside edge as shown.


Place the circle mushroom-side-down and place the stuffing in the centre. Place the cardboard circle on the top and then pull the thread tight around the stuffing and cardboard as shown below . Secure the thread by sewing in a couple of the pleats and tie off.

Then place the felt circle over the messy gathering bit and sew around the outside edge to secure. Flip over and stick to a magnet. DONE!

These ones are a bit reserved and boring and i'll post a picture of some more magnets when i get around to finishing them off and put them to work holding up pictures of sunny days and roadtrips on my kitchen pinboard!

how's the game goin?...it's in the bag!

Firstly, i apologise for the cheesey blog title....it seems i can't help myself!

What does a girl do when she has inherited 2 board games from her Grandma, which have been stored in her mother's attic for so long that the cardboard has disintigrated, but she totally wants to keep them because board games should always be played? They are fun... admit it!!

She makes cool game bags of course! Scrabble needs to be played on a board but Grandma's board had totally given up on life....sooo...i crafted an alternative, which will feature later in the blog when i get time to photograph it, but in the meantime....the tiles and tile racks fit perfectly into this girly game bag.

Same goes for rummy...or rummy-kub as poog likes to call it.

Haha i added a little white heart to it...it seems i am beyond help, i have a compulsive heart-adding addiction

gifted gingerbread

So we were invited to have sunday dinner with a family in our church who we hadn't known much about beforehand....so we didn't like to buy wine, because.....you never do know!

Plus, we're broke and I don't consider buying expensive gifty food a good use of money! So....since they have 3 kids, all of whom seemed pretty creative....I decided to give them a crafty present!

I made gingerbread men and bought a pack of writing icing tubes so they could decorate their own! I made the little tray and heart closure out of an off-cut of card but had real trouble finding cellophane to wrap them in! It seems it is only sold to traders here.

So...i used a new poly-pocket! You know the plastic pockets you put in lever-arch files? The plastic was thick and transparent and perfect for the job! I folded the two corners underneath, secured with a piece of tape. Then gathered the top, folded over and stapled twice through the card heart. Easy!!

Same approach also came in handy when taking a gift to our italian family...only modification was a slightly bigger box!!

What about these for raw creativity??