Get your 80s on!

So i'm loving the italian films from the 70s and 80s at the minute, we watch a new one every night over dinner and a glass of wine... the style is fabulous!  One of my favourite actors is Jerry Cala', for the awkward situations that he gets himself into and his hilarious catchphrases.  Reminded me of a while ago when i made one of his catchphrases into a tshirt for my gorgeous nephew...so i decided Rocket needed one too!

It translates roughly as "cool, double cool, cool with bows on!" - umm...it loses something in the translation i think...lol!!

Love it Loud!

So I think Rocket really must be a fan of italian rap music, the reason being that he lives by the motto of one particular song ....so in the spirit of Articolo 31...

...i give you piu' volume!!!

Rainbow vestments!

At the same time as the new muslins, i dyed some vests....as before, the colours washed up very bright and girly, so they're not going to be able to be used for my boy!!  I'll have to just find a baby girl to give them to...one that like tie-dye of course!  I have to say though...i love the random-ness of the pattern and the coverage...now if only i'd any more masculine dye colours left.....

How many arms?

So i have to admit that i've always enjoyed changing the baby, but it's getting steadily more difficult the older he gets.  He can now roll over and needs to be pinned down or he'll be away across the carpet with no nappy on...eeek!! danger!!  But one of the most difficult things is trying to change his clothes!  He is quite literally ALL arms and legs.  No sooner have i got one foot through or one hand through and there's another one pushing through the same hole, or the other side is out and flailing in the air...aaahh!!

So the motif i chose for this vest is particularly suitable for him!!  The vests were dyed as usual...it's a little hard to see but i used blue and green dyes and they made a lovely variegated effect. 

Muslin mistake!

So i needed another set of muslins (it's teething time!) and i wanted to do rainbow spiral tie-dye.  It's pretty easy...it's just a matter of laying out the material and then sticking a paintbrush on pencil or something in the middle and winding to make a little coiled pancake.  Then secure with elastic bands (i used thread).  Then it's just a matter of applying each dye to a quarter of the pancake.   

Easy peasy right?  See those gorgeous rainbows below?...I learned something painful with this craft...dont try to keep already-made-up cold water dye, it's not stable and it doesn't keep.  These beautiful rainbows below washed away to a dingy grey - imagine my disappointment when i opened the washing machine to pull them out!!!

So i was so angry that there was nothing to do but repeat the whole process the next night with the dingy grey muslins and some newly-made-up dye.  Only problem was, I didn't have any blue left...only a pale purple.  I was thinking is purple too girly for a boy??....well i needn't have worried, it didn't stay purple.....the red washed out to cerise pink (my fault, i didn't make it strong enough) and the purple washed out to pale pink.......talk about girly???  Needless to say, i refuse to waste them and will be using them for my boy just the same! lol!

Baby's 1st uniform!

So my bambino has enrolled in the best creche in the country while i'm at work...yep, Grandma's house!! He and his big cousin (who is a whole 6 months older - oh!!) are the sole pupils and are spoilt rotten all day long, no doubt!

So i decided to make him a little uniform, with the Grandma's Creche crest on it of course!  To make the crest i used freezer paper then fabric paint....it has the 4 most important things that make it Grandma's Creche...heart for much love, stars for lots of fun, z's for naps and a banana...well...because...you need to know my mum really!  She believes that bananas cure all ills. 

Then free-motion script at the bottom...easy-peasy!

Klaus clothespeg

So having had a little boy, i wanted to even the gender balance on the little clothes-peg people i'd been making....they're basically all girls except for the groom.  Enter my favourite style icon....the nutcracker!!

Lol...i think i love him.  I made the arms from cut up piece of a wooden kebab skewer and he even has a little blonde suede beard....seriously...i think i love him.

Dye another day

I really enjoy the cold water dyes that i scored of freecycle a while back...they are very simple to use and no real fuss.  The colour permanency is also great!!  This time i made my own colour for the burgundy stuff because i was a little worried about it turning out pink-ish...for a boy it would be a little weird.  I also experiemented a little more with putting elastic bands round bits of the muslin while dying, so giving the cool white diamond shapes.  

Let me tell you...those muslins have come in seriously handy....they've been washed 5,000,000,000 times already and the colours are still strong!

Make an impression!

So the latest thing i made (customised) for the baby room is this clay impression kit frame thing that poog bought me.  The baby's little hand and foot were just the right size to fit in it....cute!!  I'll pop a picture in it when i get round to getting them printed.  Some dodgy free-hand painting completed the camping customisation so that it matches the rest of the room. 

Lista della Spesa

So i hate going food-shopping, probably because i'm not a fan of cooking and it bores me to death buying ingredients. But i am a fan of eating, so it's pretty fortunate for me that i have a live-in italian chef...although it does mean that we are forever shopping for ingredients, and since the chef has to do a full kitchen-cupboard-audit every time before we leave for shopping...it wastes quite a bit of time. Enter.. a shopping list!SuperD rustled this one up and painted on the names of common ingredients. All the basic stuff is marked on, each with a little wooden peg to flip when we run out of something.
The aged look was achieved by dragging a lighter over the surface of the painted wood to soot-y it up a bit.
The blue paint is chalk-board paint so we can add details that aren't listed, or to specify exactly what type of stuff needs to be bought.
Then all we need to do before leaving for the shops is to take a phone-photo of the board and use it to work from while we're wandering round the supermarket! Easy peasy!!

vehicle vests

So in the interests of getting cleaner lines for the little vehicle shapes this time i used freezer paper stencils. I cut them out neatly with a craft knife so i could uses both the negative and positive stencil.
This is just to try and make the little vests a little more "masculine" because i suspect that all my colourful outfits are verging on girlyness...so i'm just trying not to give him an identity crisis too early in life you know??

day-glo onsies

So I made more of the dyed onsies, this time with short sleeves and socks to match! lol! I love how the thread doesn't take the colour so it stays white...it kindof looks like a little trim. I couldn't decide how to decorate these vests, but then decided that, because they are already so bright...it would perhaps be over-kill to add any more detail!
Me?...over-accessorising?? surely not!!! lol!

ciao bambino!

So while i was dying the muslins I also did a bunch of onsies and baby sleepsuits of various sizes. This is really for the same reason....lots of pastel blue available in the shops but not so many bright colours. Actually my blue looks very pale in this pic but it is actually quite bright...the light here was awful. The purple one was dyed in half the water which seems to give a more patchy tie-dye effect. Lastly, i added little freezer paper stencils on the front to personalise them a bit!

mountains of muslins

So apparently muslins are pretty useful when you have a baby, they're just like very absorbent, soft cloths and have millions of uses, so i had to get myself some. However, then i discovered that they are mostly plain white (yeah i know!...the flesh rebels!) or you can pay double the price for some anaemic pastel baby blue or pink ones....LAME! So i bought some of the cheap white ones and got busy dying them with my "freecycle-find" coldwater dyes.

I had never dyed any thing before so i was a bit vague about the quantities of water to powder to soda ash etc....but they turned out ok! I did learn however that trying to use less water (see the olive green ones) doesn't give such a homogeneous colour...but hey, every day's a school day. It was only really at the end that i thought of making patterns...for the orange one below i pulled lots of little bunches of the material up and put little hair elastic bands around, so they were shielded from the dye....looks quite cool i thought!

I tried it wish the sky-blue ones as well, but it's less obvious in the photo. The other blue ones were knotted and tied in strange bundles so the colour is quite patchy in a sortof vague pattern.

I also thought these little mini towels could come in useful as well, for wiping up messes and since they were 20p each from ikea, i thought i couldn't go wrong. They were a very nasty off-cream colour before they were mercilessly plunged into the dye bucket....and now...ahhh! much better!

dip-dyed baby clothes

There's really not much point in spending a lot of money or time on baby clothes for the first couple of months since they grow so fast and all the work would be wasted. Instead i bought some white sleepsuits in different sizes and dyed them up. The less water i used, the more patchy and tie-dyed the effect was (see the purple one) I can't decide though whether i want to add more detail to these...they look pretty boring...im thinking perhaps of making lino stamps or something to liven them up a little...hmmm.

camping mobile - babyroom10

So i wanted a cot mobile to match the whole camping theme and they are so expensive! I wanted to get just the stand and the musical box bit but it was even more expensive to buy them on their own, if you can believe it?! So i bought a cheap second-hand mobile off ebay for 99p. The plastic was all dis-coloured with age and the hanging bit was tired looking.

I threw out the hanging bit and got my lovely daddy to prime and spray paint the stand and the musical box with left-over pearlescent motorbike paint, which turned out to be the perfect shade of red to match in with the theme!! Brilliant!! You don't need to worry about the baby-safeness of the paint because as soon as the baby is able to move independently you are supposed to remove the mobile anyway - so he should never really come in contact with it.

So then i just sewed a reinforced circle and hung it from rainbow ribbons caught in a wee red felt heart at the top loop. It was pretty difficult to get them all about the same tension so that the mobile would hang straight....i sortof managed it.

I had sewed little pieces of the rainbow ribbon hanging from the reinforced circle, with little camping charms sewn on white felt, each mirroring the appliques on the cot quilt and bumpers etc.

It's really becoming a bit of a camping explosion in this room....i might have to stop accessorising sometime soon!!!

camping frieze - babyroom3

so this is the 3rd camping-themed craft we've got in the baby's room - a frieze of happy campers! (Again, apologies for the horrendous photo quality, i really waited as long as i could for a bright day and to no avail...the winter days are so dull here that photos are always a disaster!!)

I scanned and enlarged the applique templates on the computer and cut out templates from acetate sheets.

These were then masking-taped to the walls and i got all the family round to help fill in the stencils by sponging on paint from little tester sized pots.

The little hippy vans, washing lines and the tents were bringing out the creativity in us!

We layered up the stencils so that we got nice clean lines.

Then when everything was dry, i outlined each piece with black permanent marker.

We were all choosing which camper we would choose to go on holiday in...

i think this one might be mine...it's heading straight to the beach after all!

I thought a frieze would be good because when i want to change the theme, it won't be hard to paint out just this bit.

That particularly shadowy van is actually a beautiful shade of cherry red! Stupid dim winter days!!

This one has got to be for mamma - it's her camper and it's also headed to the beach (before hitting the supermarket no doubt!)

It's seems they're all meeting at the same place...but really, where else is there to go on holiday??

Well that's the full circuit of the room i think...anyone dizzy?

gerome the gnome

Well, lil'pill might not be powering through the books i gave her, but for good reason...she's been working on the craft project! I gave her a plaster gnome to paint - isn't he fantastic??!!

This is the same gnome shape that i painted up myself in this post - although i made mine a hot lady gnome-ette....wouldn't they make a great couple? lol!

i'm loving the texturing of the flowing beard and the little snowflakes on his hat.

Good one pill! I'm proud of you!....can i adopt him? He'd look amazing at houseofspoon!!

get well book bag

so poor lil'pill had to go to hospital for a big scary operation and is going to be sitting round the house for about 8 weeks after (!!!) so i pulled together a first aid kit of two good books (if it was me we were talking about, i'd be needing 15+ books for that length of time - but this is pill (not-particularly-fond-of-reading-when-she-could-just-watch-the-film-in-a-couple-of-hours, and i'd be astounded if she manages to finish one of them!!) and a craft project, and a bunch of sugary snacks.

I was going to bring them to the hospital for her so needed a bag. I rustled up a quick tote bag made from curtain lining (at £1.60 per metre it's usually my fabric of choice!!!) and cut a freezer paper stencil with the motif i wanted. Stamp on the red fabric paint, cure with an iron and fill with the goodies!! Done!

...after all that effort she's bound to give reading the books a go, right?....right??