Creative Collective July Project in My Creative Space

 

Just made it in time...the last day of the July Project is here!

This months objective was to finish something you'd started and put aside. Perfect timing, as I had a little project that had been sitting on my study floor for a few months that I really needed to do something about.

I started it without realizing what I was going to do with it! That happens sometimes, doesn't it.

The project started from this...

A set of bookend drawers, that seemed a decent size at the start, but then...when I put them together, I wasn't sure what I could use them for, as they were quite small!

A little brainstorming...result...they have become my ribbon drawers.

I took some craft paper (scrap booking paper is best as it is a heavier GSM), my PVA glue, trusty craft knife, metal ruler, cutting mat...and I ended up with this.

A little embellishment on the side...

There was about a half a dozen or so pieces of ribbon I bought by the metre, and they were a bit messy just rolled up. Took up a lot of space in the drawers too.

I had some thick cardboard in my stash...it always amazes me what I have lying around.

Voila!...ribbon cards similar to embroidery thread cards. They worked a treat!

All the draws are full now. Hmmm...don't know what I'm going to do when I buy more ribbons.

To see another set of draws similar to this, check out the IKEA drawers on my DIY page HERE. The link will take you straight to the tutorial.

This post is also part of 'Our Creative Spaces' over at Kootoyoo every Thursday. (I'm usually late because I'm never really in my creative space on a Thursday)

A day at the beach...

Unfortunately for Sydney-siders, this week has been pretty wet, wet, wet. In fact, I heard it was the wettest July in 50 years (??), so a trip to the beach wasn't on the cards this week for most of us. 

I've been playing around with my typography ideas again and have come up with this 'bus scroll', listing some beaches in the Forster-Tuncurry area, where the holiday house is.

It is such a beautiful stretch of the eastern seaboard of New South Wales.

This one is destined to be screen printed, maybe on plywood, and hung in the hallway downstairs.

If it comes out as I hope it will, you'll be able to find them on my 'Made it' store, along with my new 'Are we there yet, Mum' eye charts and 'Sweet Child of Mine' posters for boys and girls.

More creative spaces over here!

My Creative Space - A gift for the Mum of baby #3

In my last couple of Creative Space posts (here and here), I've been hinting there was some other baby news that was close to home.

About 3 weeks ago my youngest son and his girlfriend announced they had just had a 12 week scan. The baby is due in October.

So I am going to be a grandmother for the first time! Can you believe that?

What does any 'expectant' grandmother do on hearing this news....you guessed it....GO SHOPPING! 

One of the things they spoke about was fabric and colours for the baby's nursery, as they've asked me to make a comforter set. Off I went to Spotlight and picked up some samples to send off in the mail to Mt Isa, for them to have a look at. 

While I was there I found some gorgeous fabric to make the baby bag below. Not really a nappy bag, but one that has a few inside and outside pockets for the essentials needed on a quick trip to the shops.

The palette for the nursery will be fairly neutral. They've sent me a couple of links to get an idea of what decor they were thinking of, so I can co-ordinate a comforter set to match.

OMG....there is some simply stunning nurseries around. I had a further look myself and fell in love with the following. There wasn't anything like this around 25-30 years ago when my two boys were born!!

{Google images}

Not sure how many of you lovely followers have baby centric blogs, but if you do, please leave a comment below and I'll head over for a look to get ideas, or if you have online stores, even better.

No doubt there will be more baby news as the year progresses.

My Creative Space - A gift for Sophia

A couple of days ago I posted about my idea to try and print some fabric through my standard inkjet printer. I have a large format (A3) Epson and I thought it could handle it, as I can print up to 300 gsm paper weight.

This was the result, you can check out what I did here or click on the photo. Although the colours could have been a bit deeper, it was all I needed to complete the gift for Sophia.

So, this is how it all came together.

Lovely friends, Adrian and Fiona had Sophia Elizabeth on April 15, 2011. They didn't know the sex of the baby so it wasn't until she was born that my mind went into override about a gift. As luck would have it, it all came together on the day I left Brisbane. I stopped off at 'Coming up Roses' in Bulimba, a gorgeous gift shop owned by Hayley Lewis, close to where Brendon lives.

1. I had some adhesive lettering with a pearlescent finish.

2. The leaves have been made from the fabric I printed on the inkjet printer - as above, click on the link or the photo to see how I did it. The branch is a find from the garden, a gum tree twig wrapped in a pink ribbon and glued at each end.

3. A contrasting fabric as the background, here waiting for the glue to dry. It's been glued to a piece of cardboard (box card from an art store is a good weight for this). I find the tiny wooden pegs from craft stores (or Kikki K) are great to hold things in place while gluing.

4. The staple in crafting/artwork, an IKEA frame.

5. The three little guys who got me thinking about what to make for this special little girl. These are what I bought from 'Coming up Roses' in Brisbane. The designer is 'Alimrose Designs'.

And here it is!

When I had all the pieces ready it was pretty easy to put together. The owls have been sewn to the backing fabric, which I forgot to tell you earlier, I had ironed some lightweight interfacing to, to give it some body.

I used a blanket stitch on my machine to make the leaves after I had ironed some adhesive wadding and fusing on. I just drew a shape on the fabric, cut it out then used the blanket stitch. Lastly I put in a vein using a normal straight stitch. It all just happened!

The leaves and twig are glued to the fabric backing with 'Tacky Glue' (PVA craft glue), when they were dry, I then glued the feet to the twig.

Artwork all done, with the final step to stick 'sophia' to the matt and fit it all in to the frame.

I love it! Hope you do too!

Well everyone, this is baby #2 news. The 1st was here if you missed it. The 3rd is much closer to home. Stay tuned... a couple of you already know what the news is. All will be revealed in the next day or so!

My Creative Space...A gift for Chelsea

Lots of baby news happening at the moment...

My eldest son's best mate, David, and his lovely wife Kate, had a beautiful baby girl, Chelsea Beth, on March 16th. David and Kate were married a little while ago now and I made them this wedding gift for their home.

Brendon and David have been friends since their school days and shared a townhouse in Brisbane (with a couple of other people) for about 5 or 6 years. They play in the same social soccer (football) team, too. Never thought I'd see they day my son would strap on a pair of soccer boots. Both my boys played a lot of baseball and softball growing up.

Anyway back to Chelsea...A few weeks ago I made a lovely day trip to Berrima, south of Sydney. I love this little village but don't get there often enough. I did the usual 'browsing' (with intention to buy whatever struck my eye!!!) at a gorgeous shop, 'The Brown Shutter'. If ever you are in Berrima, you must make the visit to this shop. It is packed solid with fabulous gifts, notions, home wares, baby gifts...Yes baby gifts, and yes I did pick up a beautiful pink and white rabbit for Chelsea. Unfortunately I don't have a photo as the lovely owner of The Brown Shutter gift wrapped it for me.

{Image source}

My original intention was to make some bunting for her nursery in the 'Pink Diamonds' fabric range I designed, but knowing I probably wouldn't have enough time to make it before I left on my recent work trip, I felt at least it would be nice to have the gift for her (just in case it would be a while before I could make the bunting).

Wouldn't you know it, in the rush to pack and leave for Brisbane and Toowoomba, I left the gift in Sydney...Arrghh!

While still in Berrima, on the way back to the car, I came across this little gem, Berrima Patchwork.

 {Image source}

Didn't even know it was there, it's a little bit hidden from the road, back a bit for the actual street, behind some trees. This store apparently has a 27 year history in Berrima and Sue and her Mum were so lovely. I bought some contrasting fabrics for the bunting and really had to restrain myself from walking out with a piece of every Amy Butler fabric they stocked. Don't worry Sue...I'll be back.

I knew I didn't want to use the 'Pink Diamonds' range for the front and back of the bunting, so I selected a pink stripe, to match the pink diamond fabric (was a great match actually), then I found a yellow check/gingham and a green spot. The yellow gingham and green spot are the backing fabrics. The bunting is finished with a yellow and white spot ribbon on a white tape. Lastly, I printed her name in a matching green as a transfer and ironed each letter to a flag on the bunting. 

If you look closely at the transfer, it didn't come out 'that great', but the fabric is a linen base so it has a texture anyway, which makes the transfer look like it also has a texture. All in all, it's pretty cute..well I think it is.

The only place I could find to take a photo of the end result was on my dining room blinds, it looks better against a white background.

Two more lovely bits of baby news to come...standby, one is very close to home!!!

More Creative Spaces over here at Kootoyoo every Thursday. Kirsty is having a break until the holidays are over, so Creative Spaces are back on April 28. I thought I'd still like to do one though!

My Creative Space

My creative space today comes from my workroom, which is ALMOST in order. I've been toiling away for a while now trying to get it in to some sort of semblance of order.

The whole idea of doing this was to have a dedicated area to work from, with storage for everything...you know, everything in it's place yada yada!

I'm getting there...the problem is, my spaces for everything keep getting filled up with lovely little 'things' and then I need more spaces and places to store these 'things'. I don't think I'll ever be done with 'organising' the room. Well, that's what I like to call it...organising.

So, what's happening in my workroom. 

About 2 weeks ago, I received my FIRST ever sample pieces of MY VERY OWN designs. These were just some basic geometric and stripe patterns, but all the same they were MY DESIGNS...big YAY!!!

I'm yet to finish a couple of sling bags from the 'Circle Circle' collection, including a complimentary stripe.

Here's a photo of them as work in progress. Stay tuned as they will be up on the blog soon.

I'm a sucker for stationery...

Regular visits to Officeworks and Typo are my weakness. (Not to mention my overwhelming urges for everything IKEA)

There I've said it!

Just can't help myself, and when I started this eCourse about Blogging, I needed a note pad or something to keep my notes and info from the course.

I have a thing for white also, but when it came down to it, a white binder just didn't look right to hold all the fabulous materials from the course.

On Thursday, in My Creative Space I featured some work I did on Photoshop. This became the cover for my white binder, my font of blogging knowledge.

My Creative Space

Wow it's been a while since I did one of these.

Visit here for more fabulous Creative Spaces every Thursday on Kootoyoo.

I've been playing around with photoshop tonight as it's been a while since I did that also. I've started an eCourse on blogging and wanted to have a folder to keep my notes, so I decided I would 'decorate' it with some beautiful photos.

Part of the course in a week or 2 will be about styling your own photos at home. Now I still only have a point and shoot Fuji camera, which is fine, but when I saw my son's new Canon 7D, I now really really want a DSLR.

Be patient T!!

Tonight I hunted around the World Wide Web for some gorgeousness, settling on some very classic and subtle colours. Here's what I came up with.

My Creative Space is back...

I didn't realise it was back until yesterday when I read Posie Patchwork's post. Haven't done anything this week that's very creative, but have just picked up some more wallpaper and fabric offcuts from Signature Prints for some projects to be featured next month.

Hopefully I'll have had time to finish setting up my 'Made It' shop by then.

The pieces are fairly neutral, but they need to be for the projects I have planned.

The newest piece I've created was for our Flood Appeal Auctions, as shown below.

Don't forget to get behind the great work all these wonderful blogs have been doing to help raise money for QLD.

Auctions close on Monday 24th January, 2011 at 9PM. So if you waiting to see how high the bids go, this is the cut-off time.

Happy bidding, and thank you all for the interest you are showing in my auction items.

You'll find more Kootoyoo creative spaces here every Thursday.