Highland Summer

 May is often a really good month for us in the Highlands. No exception this year. We have had several weeks of beautiful warm dry weather. Hopefully June and July won't be too bad...often the best of summer is right now !

 I was able to make my first ever gate. I am quite pleased with the result. I am working on gate number two just now.

We already have a few strawberries ripening, although this one looks more like a bug or an alien.

I finished painting my Welsh Dresser and I am enjoying using it in the kitchen. I used Everlong Chalk Paint for this.  Now onto the next furniture on my list. Finish upholstering a couple of dining chairs and then paint a bed frame for the spare room. My list is long!

Plus we have been working in the garden slowly developing new flower beds which I am excited about planting up. Too much to do and not enough time!

Plus I entered my first Spoonflower fabric design competition. The remit was Whimsical watercolour insects. I decided on Cobalt blue beetles. I'll be very pleased if I make it into the top 25 fabrics for my first attempt.

Hope you have been having a good May.
Have a lovely day wherever you are.

A little pencil pot

I love upcycling as anyone who follows this blog will know. This pencil pot was made from two empty parcel tape reels stacked and glue together. It is surprisingly sturdy.

Decorated of course with Tonic Studios papers and dies.

The pencils are wrapped with Tonic's paper too. Wrapping pencils with thicker paper is a bit fiddly, but it makes a nice gift item to coordinate your pencils with the pot, so it is worth the effort.

Stay warm...it's rather chilly out there!

Doda
x

Upcycling Tomato Paste Tubes

You can see my ideas on using Tomato Paste tubes in your crafting over at Crafting Ireland Blog today.

A recycling challenge...

Does the cost of fancy papers put you off cardmaking? Never fear. If you have a few paper punches in your arsenal, it is possible to produce cards relatively cheaply. Here I have issued myself a challenge. Decorate a card using packaging material.

I received this sweet little body wash set for my birthday in January. I have started using it, but instead of putting the card packaging in my recycle bin, I am going to use it to decorate a greetings card.
I'm not going to allow myself anything else for embellishing the card.

A few dabs of  Craft Tacky Glue later...

OK, so it won't win any design awards, but I knocked this up pretty quick. I even had enough of the packaging left over for another card.

It was relatively thin card, but it did punch really easily with the Tonic Studios Simplicity Geared punches. Now I have a couple of cheap and cheerful cards to add to the collection !

Do you think I should send the thankyou card to the person who gave me the shower gel to see if they notice what it was made from?

Tonic Studio Tools used...
Simplicity geared punch classics
Petal pairs box set 2 and Petal Pairs petite 1
Craft Tacky Glue
Shape mates

Over at Blog Tonic I have the same post but have also included a little challenge to YOU to make a recycled packaging card. Come on over and join us.

Salty pin cushion

I'm posting over at It's a Creative World today about my salt cellar pin cushion. Why not drop by and have a look.


We had a power outage from 6pm last night until about 10am this morning. I'm glad we have a log fire in our living room! The only damage that we can see so far due to the high winds is a fence panel has blown down. I'm glad the storm is over! It was a bit wild out there.

Making a towel fancy and showing off my shower room

I have just finished sticking a bit of wallpaper in our shower room. I wish I had photos from 'before' but I never thought to take any. Believe me, it was not pretty. Mismatching ...well everything was mismatching. And the tile effect wallpaper and flowery tiles that were in the shower...and the shower enclosure...and the lighting...yeuch!

As we have our house on the market now - I thought I would dress up some hand towels to put out for viewings - should anyone ever come see our house! The market is so very slow right now and it is the wrong time of year...but I know it only takes one buyer. Anyhoo...here's how to jazz up a plain white boring towel - mine was from Asdas. Choose a towel that has a plain woven strip along one edge...this makes it easier to sew to.

 Find a strip of fabric a little wider than the towel and a little longer than the depth of the woven strip. Using your iron, turn the raw edges over to make the dimensions match the strip on your towel and press neatly. Then all you need to do is pin in place and stitch either using a machine or by hand. I did mine by hand so that the stitching is invisible, and also because at that moment my machine was in for repair! 

So I placed the towel in the afore mentioned shower room and decided that the room is still looking a bit bare, so I took another scrap of fabric and rustled up a quick pelmet. 

There, I think that looks better. I'll play around with accessories a bit now.

I'm happy with that now I think. I am pleased with the wallpaper. I'm not really a big wallpaper fan, but the wall needed more than a bit of paint. It has the look of dragged paintwork in a pale grey. It finishes the room off nicely. 

And seeing as how I am showing you this room I have to mention the loo roll holder. There was hardly any room to place one here so I had a hunt on the internet for one that I liked that was set into the wall. The only ones I could find were in the US and I didn't want to pay large shipping charges, so I got my dad to make me one. He did a fantastic job don't you think? It fits in perfectly and is unobtrusive but still looks stylish. Thanks Dad!

making a throw...

I promised you I would show you how to make a throw from a cheap store bought fleece throw and some toile fabric the same size. The reason for using cheap store bought fleece was I figured that it was not as expensive as fleece fabric per metre - it would probably cost twice as much. The fleece cost me less than £3. The toile I had was a remnant so was not expensive either.  I have made this one a birthday gift for a friend. She doesn't read this blog - I hope!

Before you do anything to your fabric, you can embellish the fleece side- this is optional. I did an applique in felt and embroidered my friend's name. I chose a pheasant because I was looking at one in the forest at the back of my house while I was trying to decide what to do.

Once that's done,  pin the right sides together of your fleece and fabric. My fleece throw had hems- some don't, if they have hems, just keep your line of sewing in a bit so that you can lose the hem when you trim.

I used my newly serviced machine - why did I wait so long, it's running like a dream now! Sew right the way round leaving a gap of about 8 inches so you can turn the fabric. Trim the excess fabric off once you have sewn round it.

Turn the right way around...

...and press carefully.

Now sew twice round leaving about a 2 inch space between each border. I use a bit of masking tape stuck on the sewing plate of my machine to line up the fabric to. I used brown for my top thread and white for my bottom thread.

Don't forget to oversew the gap. 

And that is pretty much it. And if she is in the mood for fleecy and cosy she can use this side.

And if she is in the mood for a spot of toile, she can use the other.
I hope she likes it, and I hope I have inspired you.

What do you call a whole lot of pencils?

A whole gaggle of pencils wrapped with vintage encyclopaedia pages and old maps, and packaged in my handmade boxes, will be in my Etsy shop very soon...

Vintage Leather

I finished this chair yesterday after I finally found the piece of leather I'd been looking for (while looking for something else of course). The cushion is one I made a long time ago. It is crazy patchwork and incorporates some hand drawn butterflies. It is trimmed with my favourite red pom poms. I love pom pom trim! Sad, but true!

Here it the chair in it's before state. 

It was another one of my £1 auction bargains.  I think it looks quite "gentleman's study" now. I love the look of the vintage leather, and I only bent a few of the brass upholstery nails in the process! 

I had a little scrap of leather left over, so I upcycled an evaporated milk tin and made a nice pen pot to go with the desk mat and the chair.

I cut the leather to size and then ran it through my "ready for a service" sewing machine before glueing it onto the tin. It's an easy make but looks quite classy. If you have any scraps of old leather, this would make a nice gift for the man in your life.

Thrifty Thursday

This week I wanted to tell you about my thrifty grandparents. It also gives me an excuse to share some lovely old photographs with you. I enjoy looking over old family photos and imagining what life was like for my mother and her two sisters as young girls. I hope you enjoy looking at them too!

I was over at Funky Junks blog today. Her use of crates for storage around the house got me to thinking of a special crate that I own. It must be about 65 years old and belonged to my grandmother. My mother can remember her using  Darkoline Woodstain on it.

The box came from the local greengrocers and originally contained Jaffa Oranges. My mother used it as a bedside cabinet as a young girl and can remember a little lace doily and a bedside lamp sitting on it . I have used it for various things over the years but for a while it has been  hidden in my wardrobe where it has been serving as a little storage shelf. I thought it was time to bring it out and let it see daylight again. 

How clever of my grandmother to see the beauty in this little bit of wood. I'm sure she never imagined it would become a treasured possession of mine. 

My grandparents lived in a charming house in Morningside in Edinburgh, Scotland after moving up from Birmingham, England in the 1940s. I was wondering why my grandmother would have used an orange crate as furniture, but I guess she was just into upcycling long before it became trendy. My mum thought perhaps there was a shortage of goods in wartime and so she was just being inventive. The photo above shows my mum to the right and her two sisters middle and left. Behind them are a couple of neighbours and my grandmother. 
My grandfather was as an industrial chemist, I love this photo of him in a lab.

My grandfather was very good with his recycling too. He used to methodically go through the mail every day and  fold and  cut all the envelopes that arrived into neat little bits of paper with his paper knife so that they could be used as scrap paper. A little pad of this paper held together with a bulldog clip used to sit in the kitchen ready for making shopping lists or jotting down notes.  I still have some of his recycled envelopes in our Scrabble box where they were used for writing down scores. I couldn't part them. Precious memories.  ( He always beat me at Scrabble!) 
Here are some more lovely pictures...

Check out those baggy trousers!!! :-)

and check out the swimming cossie!! Trendy huh? The little girl in the picture is my aunt - my mother's older sister .

Here is my grandmother with the same aunt. 

and my grandfather as a young man. 

On top of the crate are photos of my great grandparents on my maternal grandmothers side. They were named Abraham and Sarah,and they came from Austria and Poland. The little chair belonged to my  my mother's older sister who is now in her 80s and the Cheeky Teddy bear belonged to her younger sister who sadly died of a brain tumour a few years ago. The cushions I made a long time ago. I hand painted the butterflies with fabric paint onto some nice thick cotton, and the floral cushion I embroidered before I had any children so about 20 years ago. 
I hope you have enjoyed reading a little of my family history. 

PS.  I'm joining Funky Junks Copy Me Challenge here