Another wedding gift!

Another one of my lovely friends got married last week and I was lucky enough to be a bridesmaid again! It was such a brilliant day, great fun and everything about the day reflected her style and personality perfectly.

As a wedding gift for the happy couple, and a reminder of the day, I designed and cross stitched a sampler style momento. The colours and patterns match themes from the wedding day, as well as embroidering the place and date of the wedding at the bottom.

I love the simplicity of this idea and would love to eventually offer a customised wedding or baby cross stitch sampler on my Etsy shop... Pick two colours, a few different themes and a message and away I go! What do you think?

Wedding Quilt

Earlier this year my best and oldest friend got married and I was privileged enough to be one of her bridesmaids. I've known her since I was three years old, and we were in the same school class as each other all the way from nursery through to college. It's for this reason I wanted to get her something meaningful. I decided to make her a patchwork quilt... with three weeks to go until the wedding.

Despite working late nights and weekends on it, needless to say, I didn't finish it in time! But three months later it was finally finished and here it is...

I wanted to create something that was traditional and modern and old and new. The design is a traditional type pinwheel quilt, but the colours I chose are fresh and contemporary. The fabrics are a mixture of new and old vintage fabrics I had got from my Grandma.

I also hand embroidered a little keepsake ticket and attached it to the back of the quilt, as a reminder of the day.

All quiet on the blog front

I'm not very good at this whole blogging thing, I keep telling myself I'm too busy to write things down but truth is I just forgot or am lazy with it. However, while I haven't been blogging, I have been extremely busy with all sorts of creating and making!

First off I decided to try my hand at print making. I got a beautiful book for my birthday called Printing By Hand by Lena Corwin which is amazing. It covers block printing, stencilling and screen printing. I have done screen printing in the past at college but haven't quite got the space or supplies at home to give it a go yet, so I decided to start with block printing instead. I had somehow got it into my head that I wanted to create a wood block for printing my tomato silhouette which was so much more difficult and time consuming than I could ever have imagined. I used an old wood scrap from the garage and a dremel to "carve" the shape. The actual wood block looks great, I wish it printed as good as it looked. Maybe I need to use something other than paint to print with, ink maybe... Any suggestions?

Anyhow, since carving wood blocks proved a nightmare I have decided to use foam instead. Cutting foam into the required shape and gluing it onto a backing is soooooooo much easier and prints so much better too. I've been printing little bits of fabric with fabric paint and would love to do something more extravagant, having been inspired by the beautiful block prints of Galbraith & Paul but I have been distracted by bigger projects...

Numero one: I have been asked to make a wedding dress!!! Eeeek! Since finishing a short part time dressmaking course at the local uni, I am blatantly now a supreme expert on creating amazing pieces of couture for the most important day of peoples lives... Not. But I am more than willing to give it a go. More on that in a later post.

Numero two: My twin sisters are turning 21 this weekend, so instead of buying them meaningless gifts I have decided to make them presents that hopefully they will actually like and be more personal than yet another silver key. I can't say too much about it since they will probably read this but I will post the finished goods next week!