Easy Bookmarks

These bookmarks are very simple to make with just a few items from your craft box and a few spare minutes, my children often like to make them. So I thought I would make a special one for my husband with faux leather and little wooden hearts especially with Valentines day in mind.

First collect together the items to be used, in this case faux leather, heart shaped wooden buttons and an elastic hair tie. Any fabric or ribbons can be used here, your designs can reflect your interests or those of the person you intend to use the bookmark.

Mark out your required size of bookmark, I have made mine the width of the ruler and around 30 centimetres long... however you could make it smaller or longer depending on the size of books most commonly read. Try out a few lengths on your books to see which size you prefer and remember to take the seams into account.

Next fold the end of the fabric over the hair tie and stitch a hem as seen above, this will hold your hair tie in place. As this is faux leather it will not fray but if you are using ribbon or fabric it's best to hem each end of your bookmark.

Then stitch on your buttons, you could use just one button on the opposite side to the hair tie allowing you to hook the tie over the button to keep your page. With valentines day in mind I have sewn on two heart buttons, one on each end to symbolise our two hearts being drawn together.

As you can see it securely saves your page with no risk of it falling out like a conventional bookmark. Just to show you an alternative design....

This is my daughter's bookmark, as you can see she has used a pretty ribbon and colourful star shaped buttons for it.

She also has an added feature on her bookmark...an extra button, this allows the same bookmark to be used for many different sizes of books. Children's books vary so much in size from one to another that this gives her the choice of bookmark size.

As you can see in the photograph above the extra button allows her to securely bookmark her pages in a range of different size books. A very simple craft for your little readers to try.

Clay Doily Hearts

For Valentine's day this year we have made a clay heart garland which has been printed to look like a vintage doily. I really loved the pine cone garland we made at Christmas and have to say I really quite miss it, so we have decided to have a seasonal garland throughout the year filled with craft items and memories.

We rolled our clay out and pressed an old plastic doily that used to belong to my grandmother into it to give us the wonderful pattern. We used a cookie cutter to give us the heart shapes, put a hole in the top for the string and left them to dry.

We also made a larger one as a gift for my eldest daughter who has had heart surgery this week.

We gave them a red undercoat and left them to dry for a little longer.

To pick out the highlights in a lighter colour gives the heart a vintage doily look, and we have lightly brushed over the red hearts with a white paint. Then finished with a coat of varnish to give it shine and a little durability.

So after threading onto a rustic natural string this is what our Valentine garland looks like. Hopefully it's a lovely keepsake that we can bring out year after year and enjoy. The special one for my daughter was finished off with a red ribbon.

We wish you a speedy recovery and hope you are soon feeling much better xx

First Sewing - Felt Heart

My youngest children have been asking quite a lot lately for me to teach them how to sew, knit and crochet. They are very young so I thought I would begin by making some threading cards so they could practice the actions of sewing before moving on to making the felt hearts with real needles.

As it was coming up to Valentine's day we made our threading cards out of red paper hearts which were then laminated. Any picture could be laminated for the budding sewing enthusiast, it could be something that sparks their interest or even a drawing of their own. If you don't have a way to laminate paper, any plastic or stiff card could be used like a box or a picture from an old board book. Holes were then punched all around the outside for the stitches.

Shoelaces would be the ideal thing to use for the stitches, the rigid ends make a good needle substitute but we didn't have any colourful ones to hand so we have used wool instead. I wound a piece of sticky tape around the end of the wool tightly to try to imitate the end of a shoelace and to make it stiff for easy threading. If you look at the end of the pink wool in the above picture you will see what I mean. They played around with these cards for a while, getting a feel for how the stitches looked and made many different patterns.

Then we moved on to the 'real sewing', a cookie cutter was used to draw the heart shapes in the felt and two hearts were cut out and put together for each child. Using quite large chunky needles and wool as  thread, they both managed to do a simple running stitch all the way around the heart. Each heart was stuffed and had a piece of ribbon stitched to the top to finish off.

The children were so excited about this project and very pleased with the results, I have to say I love them as much as they do. A perfect first sewing project to keep forever, very simple and very beautiful.

They are now hanging in pride of place on our pin board for all to see.

Wooden Hearts

It is nearly Valentines day and we have been doing a few heart related crafts, many of these seem to involve sticks this year. This first heart was made with bendy twigs and copper wire, any wire or string would do here but if you are interested in getting some free copper wire from broken electrical things there is a guide here (you may need to scroll down).

This photograph shows what I started with, first pick two large sticks and bend into a heart shape, wrapping the ends with the wire to get the basic shape.

Then to create the interior design, sticks were bent and wired in place where they touched another stick, I went for a swirly pattern.

To add a finishing touch I have wired some wooden beads into the pattern and added a hanging ribbon. Here it is hanging on the wall, although I may end up putting this in the garden as a tree hanging or small garden trellis, copper ages well outdoors and goes a lovely verdigris colour.

I also tried another heart using the sticks that were left over from drying eucalyptus leaves, these sticks had an interesting colour but were much harder to work with as they weren't very flexible.

This time I started by bending some garden wire to the shape of a heart and used a hot glue gun to stick small pieces of the twigs into the shape of the heart.

I haven't quite achieved the woven twig look that I was aiming for as the stick was very brittle but it is very simple to make. I also have to show you the wooden heart my husband made. It is gorgeous and you can see how he made it here.

That's it for now although I will be back soon to show you the hearts the children made.

Woven paper hearts

As I said earlier I have been busy with little bits of crafting here and there to put on a card to give my husband on Valentines day. This time I have tried paper weaving, the same card strips that I have been using for quilling.

As you can see in the above photograph, it's just a simple under, over technique until you reach the required size. I haven't glued it at all as I plan to give the heart a paint effect but you could glue it if you choose to, you could also do this with coloured paper, to create a lovely design.

As with the quilled hearts I wanted to give the woven paper a vintage, antique feel so I started with a red paint and a very dry, stiff brush. I just lightly dipped my brush in the paint and then wiped most of the paint off before dragging the brush across the card, the effect looks a little like a fabric.

I then lightly sprayed over the red paint with gold spray, don't worry if you spray this too thick as you can gently rub off some of the gold after it is dry. This actually adds to the vintage look and you should end up with the red just showing like an undercoat.

I then decided to cut out a heart shape from the woven card, the paint should have fixed it together but if you find a loose bit a quick dab of glue should sort it out. At this stage you could really cut out any shape you want to, as long as you weave to the required size. I loved the heart like this but thought I would add some beads to see what it looked like.

I added tiny, little red beads at the point at which the card strips cross, I'm not really sure yet which I like better... with or without but I can change it back if I want to and the beads give the card an extra depth. So that is another little piece of the Valentines card finished, got to work on the design now for tomorrow, that is the hard part.

Paper quilled hearts

I have been working on a few small craft projects this last week, to use as decoration on the Valentines card that I am making for my husband. Obviously I can't show you the whole card because his desk is next to mine and he reads this. One of the crafts I tried before Christmas was paper quilling and I made these snowflakes, this time I have tried little hearts.

First I shredded my card with a paper shredder, the home made quilling tool that my husband made is also in the photograph, there is a link to make your own at the bottom of the snowflake post if you want to. I chose white paper as I had no red available but you can quill in any colour, saving time with the paint effects later.

These are the two different types of heart that I made, very simple ones as they are for the front of a card. The two at the sides are made by folding the strip of paper in half and just rolling the two ends inwards with the quilling tool and adding a spot of quick drying glue to hold the two curls together. The hearts at the top and bottom are made by rolling two whole strips up, letting them loosen slightly, then pinching one side to produce a tear shape. The two of these tear shapes are then glued together to give you the heart shape.

Then I thought I would give the hearts an old antique feel with paint effects, so first I sprayed them very lightly with a gold coloured spray paint. Lightly is the key word here because if the paper gets too wet the curls unroll. It is not the end of the world if they do though as you can just get the quilling tool and roll them up again, before they set.

 Then to give them a valentines feel I got a dry, stiff paint brush and lightly brushed red paint on the curls as you can see it has given them an interesting vintage look with the hint of redness. Now just have to complete the card.

Crayon Heart Mobile

Valentines day is coming up very soon and the children have been getting involved in some heart related crafts. We loved the look of the crayon window pictures we had seen but we didn't have any waxed paper so at first we dismissed this idea but my husband came up with the idea of printing / staining normal paper with melted crayon, so we thought we would give it a go and see what happened.

As you can see the effect is rather stunning, we ended up printing flat sheets of paper and paper after it had been crumpled to see the different effects left by the melted crayon. After assembly our mobile looked like this.

Doesn't it look lovely?  The children love crafts and we are hoping to try as many different crafts as we can, this was the first time they had melted wax crayons and it was quite exciting. First we took some old broken crayons in valentine related colours and the children grated them.

They then sprinkled the gratings onto baking paper, we placed some card onto the table first to protect the wood surface.

After they were happy with their design, we put another sheet of baking paper over the crayons and ironed them until the gratings were melted. Keep checking as this happens very quickly.

After the wax crayon has melted and cooled very slightly, peel off the top layer of baking parchment and put a normal sheet of printer paper or any other paper onto the wax, replace the parchment and iron again. This time the wax will stain or print the normal paper, we managed to repeat this process several times before all the wax ran out, sometimes we crumpled up the paper first to get a different, textured effect.

Leave each stained sheet to dry, the photograph above is one of the crumpled pieces of paper drying. It doesn't take long to dry then you can cut out your chosen shapes, we have chosen hearts for valentines day.

We cut out lots of different size hearts, the photograph above shows the range and contrast in colours, patterns and textures of the paper.

We then strung the hearts onto a piece of driftwood that we collected in the summer, any thing will do here you could even use any twig from the garden. We chose the driftwood as we felt it gave an interesting dimension to the mobile. Each piece of thread has to be long enough to accommodate how many hearts you chose to thread, we have threaded 4 or 5 on each string along with a wooden bead at the bottom to finish it off. You can use a needle to thread on the hearts and beads or just use invisible tape on the back.

There you have it an alternative way to use wax crayons to make something very pretty to hang in the window.

We had very little sun when we made this as it was a very cloudy day, but we had a few minutes to snap this picture to try to show the effect of the sun shining through the hearts. Trust me the photographs really do not do justice to the hearts at all.

They are very beautiful, each one is uniquely coloured and patterned.

As we made so many of these hearts, I have kept some in the craft stores to be used on other projects, I think they would look really nice on greetings cards or even gift labels.