on the last day of the holidays

How to make a window box on the last day of the summer holiday.

1. Find all the buttons, glue, pieces of felt, scissors, tape, shoeboxes you can find. Cover the table entirely. 

2. Make some playdough (first ever solo trip to the shop to get the cream of tartar optional here). 

3. Press down and fill the shoebox with playdough. Observe dyed-brown fingers. There may be some reminiscence about making playdough in days gone by. This is ok.

4. Make some flower stems from tightly-rolled tissue paper. Draw some petals on felt and cut them out.

5. Choose a button. Negotiate with the button owner. Re-negotiate. Glue the button on to the petals with a gluestick. It falls off. Glue it back on with PVA. 

5. Chat about school, about new beginnings. There are butterflies.

6. Display with pride. Over the coming days it's fun to water the playdough soil. It's less fun to wipe it up. 

I hope summer is ending gently for you and yours. Good luck with all new starts.

Through the looking glass

This week's offerings:

1. Hairbands. Made from an old H&M blouse and some Liberty tana lawn from the stash. A nice excuse to fire up my overlocker. I traced the shape from an existing hairband, cut two pieces and used some thicker material to line the middle. At the same time the audiobook of Alice in Wonderland has been on heavy rotation round the house. Alan Bennett's voice is a thing of rare beauty.

2. A work-in-progress blocking on the ironing board. Quite excited about this one. Blocking is the very satisfying moment at the end of a crochet project, when the crumpled up bit of wool fabric becomes fluid and smooth. I used to do a complicated move involving a towel and a large cutting mat to create a blocking board. Then I realised that the ironing board did the trick brilliantly.

If you are interested there is a great blocking tutorial here. 

3. A jellyfish made of rick rack, felt and some buttons. Her (of course she is a her) name is Jellina. I think it suits her. 

Felt: the best craft material in the world. Discuss.

4. The shop became a shop again! We got the awning down and held a children's art sale for Comic Relief. On sale were greetings cards - blank for your own message - and canvases.  

It was all the big girl's idea. She raised a small fortune thanks to a winning combination of very loud sales patter - thereby making her impossible to ignore - and cuteness.

Bucking the trend: Library opens

Like many families with young children, made-up stories are very much a feature of our lives, and a part of being a parent I find quite hard. Tell you a story from my head?  Do you realise it is 6.45am? Learn how to make tea and I'll tell you a story.

I usually defer to their dad, who finds the muse quicker than I do. Some of these stories and characters have become part of family life.

For my daughter, a highlight of the trip to the library is having a go at stamping the return date. And so, inspired by this rubber stamp I bought in Lille, we have been playing libraries.

I made a few little books for our library, and this lead naturally to making our own storybooks. Drawing the covers, writing the stories, it was lovely. And a very funny insight into the nearly four-year-old mind:

And so, the little books became a way of recording these stories, a snapshot of a time that will pass before I know it, and doubtless before I am ready.

I used some thin A4 card for the covers, I sliced them across the middle and folded in half. For the pages, I used some A5 coloured paper, though plain would do. 

Folded in half, I found the centre, and using thick thread (tacking or button thread) I sewed the whole together with one large stitch. I finished by tying a really strong knot and trimming off any overlapping edges.

We made little tickets for the inside cover - and for the all-important stamping - and they were finished.


I think she needs to work on sustaining the narrative arc, otherwise great. The Booker prize 2041 is in the bag.

papier mache bowls

Indian summer crafting is, I think, made for papier mache. 

You can go fancy with chicken wire, snips, wallpaper paste and such. These are just flour, water, salt and local paper. 

And none the worse for it.

The paste is one part flour to five parts water and a tablespoon of salt stirred on a medium heat. The bowls were covered in cling film first, and you need at least four layers.

Also helpful would be some sun. The weather last week was not great, so these bowls took about four days to dry. When they were finally dry they suffered a bit of collateral damage coming out of the bowls as I had to slip a knife in between the bowl and the papier mache to get them out, but this got covered up at the decorating stage. Perhaps putting a bit of vaseline on the cling film first would have helped.

We all loved this stage: watered down PVA in abundance and torn up strips of pretty paper to cover up the newspaper and mend any tears.

A lot of fun, and such a great project for kids. On this occasion if I am being honest the fun was mainly mine, as attention spans seemed especially short. 

Perfect for collections and collectors of any age.

rainy day women

We found a photo recently of my older daughter wearing a little yellow wooden toy watch bracelet. She loved it very much indeed, and then lost it. The photograph brought all the pain back. There was a lot of fruitless searching and some tears. I guess no one forgets their first watch.

At the same time, a book my mum recently gave me had a project to make a fabric watch. 

And so a visit to a friend's house on a rainy day with four little girls to entertain became a fantastic crafting session.

We made ours a little simpler than the one in the book, which, whilst lovely, was a process more for the grown ups. 

We measured little wrists, then chose a felt colour and a fabric scrap. Using pinking shears we cut a strip with a circle shape in the middle the same length as the wrist, to make the base of the strap. Then the fabric scrap was cut the same shape but slimmer so as to leave a little gap around the edge.

Then a quick go on the sewing machine to stitch the two together. The faces were cut from felt or another scrap and hand sewn on with a few stitches. On one of them I made the stitches into the digits.

Each girl decided what her favourite time of the day was (one o'clock and ten o'clock respectively) and this was drawn on with a permanent marker. I had some big ideas about moving hands using paper fasteners, but decided to keep it simple. And we had no paper fasteners.


Strangely, neither of them recognised the Withnail (or Marwood) quote about a stopped clock being right twice a day that had their mothers giggling. 

A press stud was sewn on by hand and, done!

We even had a bit of time, creative energy and felt left for some binca:

some bead sweets:

and some hairclips:

Lovely.