sleeping beauty...and the beast?

Well i commissioned this masterpiece from my favourite artist and gave very specific instructions as to how it should look....in my opinion, she outdid herself. The pale greens in the background fit in with my "secret garden style" bedroom and the roses mirror the rose garlands that i've wound round the wire bedstead. (it's so whimsical it makes me laugh sometimes!)

I love the fairytale quality, the fact that you know she is dreaming about walking through a quiet forest and discovering a secluded leafy glade bathed with sunshine directly in the centre.

SuperD did his framing magic to give it a proper setting, and now it hangs above our bed where another sleeping beauty often lies snoozing in the sunshine....i obviously don't mean me here, because if there's daylight - i'm working!!

(sigh....but then if SuperD is sleeping beauty,...what does that make me???!!!)

pocket-size-wrap for pocket-size-person

Well, there is a pocket-size person I know who has been very good to me and I wanted to show my appreciation....what to do?...what to do?....i know! A little organiser wrap for shopping lists or holiday lists or any other lists that exist in life (if it's anything like my life, that's 1 million lists)

So here's how i did it!.....

Cut 1:

- white brocade 20.5cm x 34cm

- red gingham cotton 20.5cm x 34 cm

- red cotton 12cm x 14cm

- clear pvc 7.5cm x 10cm

- clear pvc 4cm x 10cm

- white aida 2cm x 10cm

- piece white elastic (for closure)

Cut 2:
- red gingham cotton 7cm x 20.5cm

- red cotton 6cm x 20.5cm

Click on this link or on the picture below to enlarge and read the measurements of the inside and the outside of the organiser wrap.

Instructions

1. Fold a 1 cm seam allowance under the inner one side of each of the small gingham pieces and sew as shown to the white brocade.

2. Fold a 1 cm seam allowance under each edge of one of the red cotton pieces and sew to the centre of the white brocade with a seam down each edge.

3. Do any decorating of the blank spaces now...i carved a little camper stamp from an eraser and used red fabric ink (Don't forget to heat seal the ink for permanence!)

4. For the inside, use the red gingham and sew a red cotton piece in the centre as before.

5. Bias bind the top of the pvc pieces and sew in the positions shown in pattern.

6. Hem the red cotton pocket with a 1 cm seam allowance at the mouth and sew into position, folding a 1 cm seam allowance under on the three other sides.

7. I pushed two document tags through the holes in the aida before sewing into position, so that the wrap can use recycled paper (once punched) as well as ready-made notebooks (slot the last page into the pocket to hold in place)

8. Add any further detail such as the elastic pen holder or little decorations.

9. Put the 2 finished pieces, right sides together, and sew around the outside leaving a...yes you guessed it....1 cm seam allowance. I also sewed in a layer of stiff interfacing, but you can use quilt batting for a "padded, squidgey" feel or don't bother adding anything...up to you. Don't forget to leave a little gap so you can turn it right side out.

10. Once the wrap is right-side-out, sew around the outer edge again (1 cm seam allowance) to reinforce the edge

11. I encorporated sewing in a piece of elastic into the last step as a closure...but you can use a loop and button, whatever you fancy.

12. I also made a little padded button to decorate the elastic (using the padded magnet method in another post) and embroidered mumito's name, just in case all the little campers didn't give away who owns it!!!

And it's done!!!

Under the vines...

desperately needed something to break up the huge CREEEEAM wall that spans my open plan ground floor, running along my dining section and into the sun room...

...ivy ought to do it!!!


Although...what this picture does not show is the fact that i went into a foliage-frenzy right after this in my dining section and accessorised with a vine-style wine rack mounted to the wall and twisted an ivy garland around my chandelier over the table.

Poog thinks it make the room look smaller, but to me it makes it "nookier", more cosy, you know...like you gather in the "garden-corner" to eat.....i think it helps to give each part of the bigger open-plan room its own little identity, like it can stand alone.........ok, i'm stopping now, if i go on any further they'll give me my own talkshow on US tv, and noooobody wants that.

tree of light

Also known as "halloween forest"... because, without the lights on, you'll be forgiven for thinking it's a little creepy. I agree, not many people have gnarled twisted trees beside their dining table!


But it really adds such character to the dining experience with all the other lights off....makes you feel like you are having a type of haunted midnight picnic....and we all love those right??....right??

hmm..well ok then....i love it, and i especially love how easy it was to make! (a simple matter of tying branches (snipped from my aunt's hazel tree..i think it was a hazel tree...i could be wrong) to the stem of a cast iron parasol base and winding twinkle lights around it.....at least, i'm saying it was a simple matter, because of course SuperD did it, so it really was genuinely easy for me)

I wanted it to look like it was still growing (without bringing dirty soil into my pristine house, of course) so we built a little twig-enclosure round the base (expandable trellis fencing from the garden centre) and filled it with rocks taken from the decorations at our wedding.

....and that was pretty much it!

...sparkle-tastic!!

That is a framed menu from a ristorante and pizzeria in Roma in the background, so I like to pretend that i'm eating on a ivy laced terrace in italy under the stars...mmmm...ok! that's enough sentimentality!

With this, the ivy garland above the table, the ivy stencil on the wall and the grape-vine wine rack my house is starting to look like the site of a invasion....one which the garden is evidently winning!

...but, i've got no problem with that!

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)