When I visited The Great Northern Quilt Show earlier this year, there were so many amazing stalls – it really was like Christmas had come early! One of my favourites by far was Colouricious, and they had the most beautiful hand carved wooden stamps. I bought a few Colouricious stamps (and it took a while to choose, I must admit!) and a bottle of decolourant, which looked fab. Well, yesterday I finally got around to trying them out! 

Testing my Colouricious stamps

I had pre-washed my fabrics so that I was ready to go, and started with the square geometric blocks. I just played around really, as this is the first time that I had used decolourant. It basically does what it says on the tin – it removes some of the colour once you have stamped and ironed over it. The more you use and the more you iron, the more colour is taken away, and the fun thing is that you don’t really know how the colours will look!

My first attempts on the purple looked like this once I had ironed them, and I tried some out on pink too. I really like the contrast between the colours here! I decided to make a few patchwork squares which I’ll use in a future project.

Christmas stamps

I recently added some of the Christmas stamps to my collection, and have some ideas for creating a few cards – whether I’ll be able to get them made in time for this Christmas is another story! I stamped some snowflakes and a tree onto some red and green fabrics – the red was definitely more successful than the green.

I’m really excited to start working on some new projects with these gorgeous stamps, so look out for more in the future! I would highly recommend these stamps – the detail is wonderful and they are such good quality. Visit the Colouricious website for more information (link at top of this post).

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As you know, I’ve been working on loads of top secret things recently! This cushion is a project for Less Grafting More Crafting, which we’ve done as a guest post on the fabulous Courage and Dash blog – and you can now read the tutorial here! (The internet ate our original post, but the problems have now been fixed, so the link should work now!).

It is a happy day – it’s Friday! Have a great weekend everyone!

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March seems to have gone in a flash! Here are my favourite Instagram photos from this month

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There are some really old buttons in there! Loads of them are so pretty, and I think we could have spent all day admiring them!

Mum kindly said that I could take these ones home I’m so pleased with them – and I’ll probably store them up for a while until I decide what to use them for! In the meantime I can just admire them.

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October was a busy month for me on Instagram – so many pictures to choose from! These are some of my favourites

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I love the variety of projects in Mollie Makes, and I particularly love finding out about new blogs and discovering new crafters. This project is from last year but I didn’t get round to making it at the time, and I’ve been planning on making it as an autumn project for this year! These Liberty fabric leaves from issue 19 are just gorgeous, and Jenny Dixon’s blog is a great find. Jenny has included a free tutorial to make a different design of leaf on her blog, but I’ve made a leaf that appeared in the magazine (templates are available to download – click here). The fabric I’ve used is Liberty Tana Lawn in Wiltshire Berry print, and I’ve used extra wire here in order to make my leaf into a bookmark.

You will need:

Liberty fabric (it’s a good way to use up your scrap fabric – anything with a small print will work)
Some craft wire
Lightweight interfacing
Wadding
Needle and thread

The first step is to draw around the leaf template that you want to use (I use greaseproof paper to make the templates – it’s really easy to cut out and pin on to any fabric!). Then iron some lightweight interfacing onto the back of your fabric. Fold it in half, pin the template through both sides (so that you can cut two leaves at the same time) and then carefully cut around the template.

Then use the template to cut out another leaf shape on some wadding, cutting it slightly smaller than the fabric leaves. Next, take a long piece of wire and double it to form a little loop at the end before twisting the rest to make a stem. Leave the ends free so that you can put them inside the leaf to act as spines.

Layer the leaves up with the wadding and wire in the middle and then pin it to secure it. Thread a needle with thread and sew the layers together around the edges with a fairly small running stitch.

When the edges are completely sewn and the wire is secure (you may need to add a few little extra stitches at the back to secure it firmly), sew a running stitch to make the spines of the leaf.

Ta-dah! That’s it – a super easy project that looks great and only takes around 30-40 minutes to make

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I bought these wooden drawers months ago, and did a little blog post about them at the time with my idea to do them up. This year really has flown by – when I looked for the original post, I was really surprised to find that it was in January! So, it’s October and I’ve finally got around to doing it! The insides of the drawers had been painted but they were a bit dusty (maybe done with chalk paint?), and because I want to use them to store haberdashery bits and pieces I thought that I’d be able to line them.

I chose some pretty scrapbooking papers to line each one. The first job was to measure up and make a template – harder than it sounds, as each drawer is slightly different, but I managed to make a ‘one-size-fits-all’ pattern!

When the pieces were cut out I used some glue on each piece to stick them in, starting with the sides. I didn’t put glue right to the top, but used some double-sided sticky tape along the tops to make sure that the paper really sticks well.

Once all of the drawers were lined, I left them for a few hours to dry (this also gave me time to decide what would go in each drawer!). I measured out some pieces of card for labels and then used some rubber stamps to stamp each one. Ta-dah!

I’m really pleased with how they turned out I actually found a larger set not so long ago, and I’m planning to do the same with those ones too! Photos to follow…when I get around to it!

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