Sock knitting may be the most therapeutic activity ever invented.
In other news, I finally got round to booking my tickets for the move. I was procrastinating since I didn’t still don’t know when my thesis will be finished and submitted, but whatever, I am leaving on the 10th October!
After packing away all my knitting supplies to be shipped to the US, I had an overwhelming urge to have a go at knitting some socks! I know, like I have nothing better to be doing with my time right now… After browsing Ravelry I decided on this pattern from Knitty as it got great reviews as a good first sock pattern, plus it is customizable to fit my weird shaped feet! After much deliberation I picked out some yummy yarn from Get Knitted (Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock Multi in Flamingo Stripe) and some circular needles (all of mine are packed away, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t have any this small – 2.25mm! Hope they won’t be too fiddly!) I’m looking forward to getting started with them soon! Ravelry is a great site for knitters – I joined over a year ago but hadn’t really explored it until now – it has a huge database of pretty much every pattern out there, whether online or in a book, and you can see other people who are knitting the same pattern, what yarn they are using, photos, comments etc. Here is my profile if anyone is on there, feel free to add me as a friend 
Phew, it’s roasting in Oxford at the moment, not that I’m complaining – I love this kind of weather. Long may it continue!
I finally got around to taking some photos of my latest invite creations, and I’m so pleased with how they turned out! Many hours of painstaking work went into these which I designed from scratch (except the monogram, which was provided by the bride and groom). The invite is double sided, and even the envelopes received some gocco treatment too! I designed them for an Italian couple after the lovely Silvia recommended me. Thanks Silvia! What do you think?
details blurred for privacy
Thanks everyone for the kind words about Shredder. I said to Mr Paperleaf, how do people deal with this when their child’s pet dies? I cannot begin to imagine… I am not sure whether our future children will be allowed pets, I don’t think I could handle the trauma!
Anyways, let me give you a sneak peek at my latest wedding invite order. More pics to come when I get round to a proper photoshoot – I also have some new gift tags that I need to photograph for the shops, made from the birds on the surplus invite prints from this order. They are similar to these but with pink leaves – cute!
Now that the flippin’ parcel finally arrived, this weekend I finally got round to printing one of my invite orders! Top secret for now I’m afraid, but here are some sneak peeks… I set up my tripod in the craft room aka cave as I thought it would be fun to do a ‘before’ and ‘after’ shot of my workspace… I’m not the tidiest person around! I love nosing around other people’s workspace so feel free to comment with a link to a photo of yours!
Before: relatively tidy (this is as good as it gets!)
After: well, technically ‘during’, but this is the natural state!
Mixing the perfect shade of pink
The third layer of printing (5 altogether!)
I’m having a sneaky afternoon off work to sort out the final details for Handm@de tomorrow… I just popped to town to pick up some change for the stall and fabric to cover my display boxes with, I think everything is nearly done! Just need to iron my tablecloth… Twitter and the forums are raging with people panicking and stressing though! For future reference, here’s my must-take craft fair list:
Phew! It’s a good job I have a box-carrying helper!
I bought some paper bags from ebay (something like 100 for £1.50) and they were looking a bit boring so I gocco’d them after doing some cards – here they are! I think they look quite pretty now and will be perfect for popping purchases in, along with a couple of business cards of course!
Here’s some pics of my new cards that will be debuting tomorrow, I hope people will like them!
See you tomorrow if you’ll be in Cambridge I’ll report back on Sunday with photos!
It’s been a busy week around here, writing a conference paper during the days and getting ready for Handm@de during the evenings! I’m nearly there though and very excited about Saturday!
Thanks for all the comments about the shop, nobody’s actually bought anything yet but I wanted to have it all set up before Cambridge so that all my new loyal customers can come back and buy more once they realize they didn’t buy enough at the craft fair (can dream, right?) After all my hard work though, Royal Mail have gone and put the postage costs up today so I need to redo my shipping prices, grrrrr.
Hot on the Gocco grapevine today is this amazing tattoo belonging to the fabulous Heather Jeany! Now THAT is commitment to the cause. Way to go!
I had almost forgotten that I’d signed up for Handm@de Cambridge next week, since I’ve been so busy with wedding invite orders! Rumour has it that the Etsy head honchos will be stopping by the craft fair to say hello on their European tour… How exciting! So this weekend I’ll be having a crafterthon to try and get some stuff together… I’ve already done a few things, such as these new gift tags made from an old map.. At Christmas I made my dad a clock from an old map of Scotland which I mounted on some wood, since he loves mountains and maps. It turned out pretty nicely for the “dad who has everything”!
I’ve been brushing up on my product photography skillz ahead of launching my shop on this site – and also designed some new packaging for my gift tags. The back has a little blurb and my shop address. What do you think?! More at Flickr.
Speaking of my new shop, if anyone would be up for testing it before it goes live I’d be really grateful – please leave a comment and I’ll send you the secret url to play with! I hope to launch it before the craft fair, as it’s going on my new moo cards which I’ll be dishing out by the handful at Cambridge!
Some dear friends recently had a gorgous baby so what a perfect excuse to make a quilt! I’ve never made one before so was a bit clueless… I ordered some gorgeous fabric last week fromThisandThatFromJapan and was stunned when it arrived in just 3 days – it can take longer than that for things to arrive from the other side of Oxford! Wow. She has so much awesome cute fabric it was difficult to narrow it down, but I eventually picked out some colourful elephants since Oli is half Thai, and some contrasting aqua polka dots. For the back of the quilt I chose some cute blue flowers with red dots, and I got the wool batting and some plain brown fabric for the binding from Masons in Abingdon.
The pattern I used was a smaller version of the easy lap quilt pattern from Amy Karol’s Bend The Rules Sewing. I used squares instead of strips and a double layer of batting to make it extra cozy!
Elephant fabric ready to be cut into squares
Squares all cut out and ready to pin
Luckily I had some help!
Quilting
Embroidered label (hopefully his Thai name is legible!)
It was such fun to make this quilt and I can’t wait to pass it on to my friends tomorrow, hope they like it! I’d love to make a full-size quilt one day but after doing this I have no idea how people manage it – it would have to be at least 4 times the size of this one – how on earth do you get all those layers through the machine?! Answers below please!
Deepa asked how I made the Christmas bunting, so here’s a quick tutorial! I kind of made it up and combined tips from various other bunting tutorials out there, but this is my version…
1. Make a template
Fold some paper in half and make a triangle. I used 9×17cm but you can make it bigger or smaller depending on what you like (I really want to make mini bunting for the tree instead of tinsel, but fear it may push my sanity over the edge!) Cut along the line and unfold.
2. Cut out the triangles
I think it’s quickest to do them in strips; fold your fabric in half and cut into strips that are the same width as the length of your triangle template (17cm for my template). Then work your way along the strip cutting out the triangles. I find it’s useful to keep the cut triangles in the pairs that you cut (because the fabric is folded) as they’re easier to line up when you come to sew them together.
6. Sew onto bias binding
I used a nice narrow 16mm binding – you can iron it flat to make it neater but I didn’t bother as it would have taken forever to do 15m! I got my binding on ebay as it was much cheaper than getting it by the metre from the fabric shop. I placed the triangles one after the other with only a ~1cm gap between them but you can play around with the spacing. Sew with a zig-zag stitch and feed each triangle into the bias binding as you complete the previous one.
Let me know if you have any questions!
