Handmade cards and other crafts, templates & tips

 

I had such fun making these two Christmas stockings. The one with the teddy is for my son Alex and the other one is on its way to my niece, I hope she likes it. Alex loves his but he'll like it even more when it starts getting filled with little gifts.

They were much quicker to make than I'd thought. If you'd like to make some too you will find the top part of the stocking here, the bottom part is here, click here for the teddy and here for the star.

Today I'm going to show you how I made these cute hair clips.

Let's start with what you need, just check the photo below for a visual guide. I'm going to make the pair for the one with the blue crochet flower:

 

Circle template (big enough for your hair clip, you can use anything that's round. I used my Fiskars template)

2 felt circles

Crochet flower to which I added a bead in the centre

Thread

1 hair clip

Step one

After cutting the 2 circles out of felt, I stitched my crochet flower to one of the circles and added the blue bead to the centre of the flower.

Step two

The next step was to make a small cut on the other felt circle, as the photo shows. Determine where this cut should be using your hair clip as a guide.

 

Step three

I then inserted the bottom part of my hair clip through this cut.

Step four

I closed the clip and turned it downside up. This is what you should have.

Step five

For this step, I made a sandwich placing the felt circle with the crochet flower on top of the circle with the hair clip as you can see in the photo below.

Step six

My last step was to go around with a blanket stitch to join the top and bottom circles. This is the result:

Hope you enjoy this tutorial

This is what I made lately:

Also made some new cards:

My son Alex is always complaining that I never make anything for him!! Before you say "Poor boy!" read back some of my posts and you'll see how unfair this accusation really is.

Anyway, next month he's going on a 3 day school trip and all the children are allowed some pocket money. Alex has a wallet but it doesn't have a zipper and he needs one where he can keep his change safely... Enter crafty mum and this is it:

He chose the patterned felt he wanted me to use and I spent the whole morning working on it mainly because I really don't like sewing zippers onto things, never did and no matter how many tutorials I see on the Internet telling me how easy they are to sew I'll never get the hang of it!

Can't wait for him to come back from school today and see this.

I recently learnt 2 new embroidery stitches; the fly stitch (on the left) and the feather stitch (on the right).

These 2 stitches are very easy to learn and master and although they look gorgeous on their own I love them embellished with little beads and sequins.

I used the fly and feather stitch for the first time on this wall hanging I finished a few days ago and I'm quite proud of how they turned out.

If somehow, after reading this and having a look at the links below you feel like giving hand embroidery a go I would advise you to first experiment on a separate piece of fabric so you get the hang of the particular stitch you chose.

For brilliant video tutorials and links to patterns check ou the Needle 'N Thread website.

The following websites/blogs are also well worth a visit:
Knitting-and.com
BellaOnline
Primrose design

Have fun embroidering