My SUPER DUPER GIVEAWAYYY!!!!!

I hit my first goal of 200 'likers' on my facebook page!!

You're all amazing people who I love enough to lick but you're too far away, so I'll just lick my screen instead.... theeere we go...

I have 6 (SIX) items that I will be giving away to ONE lucky reader!

Did ya see it!?!?!?

ok, I PROMISE this is the last you're going to hear about it, if you 'like' my facebook page*, you'll be SICK of hearing about it now, but look see what Craftster Mod SevsOnlyGirl said about MEEEE!!!

*if you're reading this and you DON'T 'like' my facebook page get your ass over there RIGHT NOW!! you're missing out on SO MUCH!!

 see that??
"The most adorable pregnant woman, I've ever seen" ... da-awwwww!!! thanks Craftster!!...

So if you're viewing this post on my actual blog, you will notice that I've got a new tag-line!!

Crinkle Taggie Baby Soother - Tutorial

ok then, remember these noisy toys?



In a previous post I showed you how to insert the jingle bells into the taggie plush :-) Now I'm going to show you how to make the Crinkle Taggie Soother.

The Internet has told me that babies love things that crinkle, and things with ribbon loops/tags, and this is my response! err... unfortunately I have no way of verifying this information at this point since my lazy baby still isn't here! and even when (s)he does arrive, I hear tell that they don't do much except cry, sleep, feed and wee for the first few days.

Anyhow, click here for the printable -step by step tutorial - for how to make a Crinkle Taggie Baby Soother!!

Click the read more link to see some work in progress pics and take a quick tour of the construction process:

Having a little design fiddle

blog is looking a little funky at the moment... bear with me... hopefully will be nice and shiny soon :-) will tell you when I'm done... feel free to let me know what you think at any time... xxx

Carboot sale stuff...

trying to keep my mind off my late'n'lazy baby we went to a carboot sale today and I got some good sewing stuff... I don't really do cross stitch but I thought for 50p I had to have that aida! haha.

here's what I got!

and some good excercise to boot :-)

Waiting for my egg to hatch.. ,

This is what I was working on this afternoon:

I don't 'do' painting.. or that is, I don't usually do painting... so this was a good distraction while my 'due date' went by...

going to have a walk round a carboot sale tomorrow, see if I can find anything interesting and hopefully get this baby party started....

Tutorial! How to make a Jingle Bell Plush!

So guys, I've made a couple of noisy baby toys for a friend. A jingle bell plush and a crinkly taggie 'blanket'.
Today I'm going to show you how to make the plush, The 'blanket' coming later in the week.

Here's a video of them 'live' so to speak - obviously you'll need your speakers on to fully enjoy the noisiness of them :-)



Here's the tutorial for the plush itself. (as you can see.. not my work)
And here's the extra tutorial (mine) for adding in the jingle bells.

And here's some more pics of the plush!! <3! (after the 'read more' link)

PM: Upcycled Mens shirt into an Empire Line Dress. FINISHED!

6 DAYS TO GOOOOOOO........... !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  !!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!

OK time to come clean... this dress has been finished for AGES!... but .... well it's 'flouncy' and ridiculous... and it feels completely silly sitting around the house in it.

I will be making another one (because even when I don't need the bump-room I'm unlikely to want to be dressed in tight fitting clothes) I have a feeling when I've toned down the colours a little and got rid of the silly frilly/misbehaving collar it'll be a lovely comfortable nursing dress.

ok so lesson learned, don't pair a pattern with another pattern, a flat colour for the shirt or the skirt would be slightly less ridiculous.

but meh, life is for learning.... so here's the pics!!

as you can see (especially in the side-on pic) a 3 inch front hem extension is enough to keep the hem level with bump... I'm 39 weeks pregnant :-)

ooh... and another thing! I've converted the tutorial for this dress into a pdf, you can download it here.
also the stretch mark fairy visited me last night... bad times!

PM: Upcycle a Mens shirt into an Empire Line Dress. TUTORIAL

Now I know it's traditional to post the tutorial after I show you the finished project - but I'm not up for having pictures took of me and my big fat swollen feet at the moment :-)

so here's my first illustrated tutorial!!

This dress is great for many reasons
(1) you can make it as a maternity or a non-maternity dress
(2) you can make it as a maternity dress and then with a quick em adjustment, you can still wear it once your body has shrunk back down to normal proportions ^.^
(3) it doubles up as a nursing dress because it's button up
(4) it's elasticated so you don't have to worry too much about sizing
(5) its SUPER easy!!!

it's ALLL good baby!

EDIT: I dont know what the hell Picasa has done to my pictures to make them so blocky- BUT I've converted these imaged into a PDF that you can download and print. download it here

Embroidered Stargate Baby Vest

oh baby :-)

PLEASE tell me you recognise that guy!

I've agonised for AGES over whether or not that looks enough like Jack O'Neill... in the end I put the little point of origin symbol in the bottom left hand corner just to give people a little clue :-)

Of course not every one's seen as much Stargate as me and my family (ie. ALL of it :-) ) but hopefully the text makes this project 'accessible' to all on some level or other.

Yet another example of my incredulity and recognition of the absurdity that within a couple of weeks I'm going to be taking the final blindfolded step into the precipice of parenthood... I can't believe I'm already 38 1/2 weeks pregnant.

Here, have the picture I used as a kind of pattern:

 

Hopefully you can see what I did there... I put this image together on Gimp by fiddling with the colour levels and adding the text.Then I more or less used my monitor as a lightbox and (tried my best to...) trace all of those black shaded areas directly onto my fabric... and then just stitched!

I tried to use my intuition/gut feeling about how to compose the image, starting with the larger shaded areas, filling them in with satin stitch, and then outlining that, and doing the finer lines with backstitch. The text is done in a mixture of chain stitch and backstitch to make some words seem more bold than others.

Here's my work on the hoop for you purists!

 one and a half weeks to go... hopefully....

And now it's a frilly unicorn cushion :-)

see?

So. This baby cushion is (surprisingly) made out of upcycled materials... the floral base fabric is a duvet cover and the bias binding edging to the frill is made from an old pillowcase (I love it and I've got loads more, making your own binding strip is such a good way of using up small amounts of fabric)

And I've made it into a cushion cover so it can be removed and washed (and so I can make other covers :-))

The size of the cushion pad itself is 12"x12" (I made it out of a spare pillow we had in the house)

:-) very happy... and if Squiggle is a boy...  then this is my cushion :-)

Unicorn Embroidery Finished (kinda) and why I love Pinterest

here's the wide shot:

The light in my dining room is terrible, this is after much colour/contrast manipulation and it's the best I can get.... nevermind... as the title suggests it's not quite done yet. The embroidery is done, but I'm going to make it into a frilly pillow ^.^ so there will be other photo ops.

Let me tell you the story of this embroidery, before I show you the close-ups.

37 Weeks (& going a little crazy at 4:30am)

Gosh 3 weeks left to go... hopefully. Don't worry there will be some actual embroidery in this post, it's not all about Squiggle. But (s)he is dominating my life a little right now so suck it...

Last night I hauled my pregnant ass out to karaoke :-) I like karaoke, but it's hard to sing with your lungs, intestines and stomach all pushed up in your ribcage. I haven't been to Karaoke since before I was pregnant so there was lots of "woah what happened?!" from well meaning people who recognised me from before, as well as the usual stares from strangers who don't understand that they do allow pregnant women into pubs nowadays.

Anyhow I sang True Colours, started a bit crap, got better towards the end of the song, it was quite triumphant, drunk people loved it. Then my friends from Cherry Scream (find them on FB!) got up and sang Highway to Hell and You Give love A Bad Name, I sang along at the top of my lungs (not very far away from the bottom of my lungs) it was very cathartic...

I got into bed around 1am and (thankfully) fell asleep quite quickly... which was good because I woke up at 4am, on my back, feeling really uncomfortable. I tried to roll over onto my right hand side (this is how I usually sleep - it's the only way I can sleep - with a pillow jammed between my knees) but Squiggle wasn't having any of it. So I gave up at 4:30 am and came downstairs.

I was awake.

I made the Husb0t a sandwich to take to work today... I decided I needed to leave him a note in case I fell asleep on the couch before he woke up:

(read more after the jump... )