Handmade gifts

In an earlier posts I mentioned that my son loves colorful cloths and he loves his two very happy trousers. He apparently is not the only one, because one of his friends placed an order for such a pair of trousers. The fifth birthday of my sons friend is this week and I therefore created another pair of Small Fry Jeans. The friend is similarly build as my son. I hope that both the friend and his mother will like it.

I have made more gifts this year which I did not blog about yet. Some of the pictures are from before I made my resolution to make better pictures.

From this girly skirted onesie I actually made two, for two different girls. I used an Ottobre pattern for the onesie and I based the skirt part on an exiting skirted onesie I received when our youngest was born.

One of my friends liked the (regular) onesies I sewed my youghest and when she gave birth to her second child, I gave her this one.

This dino I made for a small boy. It was a very easy and quick gift, you find the tutorial here.

Besides sewing I crocheted a moos/deer. You can see the other animals I made earlier this year here. This moos/deer is not from the Edward's Managerie book, but from a pdf pattern set that I received because I bought the book directly through Toft.

In my previous post I already said that I used my recently acquired Silhouette for multiple types of projects. When a loved daycare lady stopped working at our location I made her a mug. With my Silhouette I cut two pictures of our youngest girls (the ones she took care of) and peeled the "negative part". Then I glued them on a mug and colored the cut-out pieces with a porcelain pen. After half an hour in the oven the mug is dishwasher proof.

The last set of pictures shows another recently made gift. I came across a technique that I had never seen. With zippers a frame is created and the spaces between the zipper parts are filled with needle felting. I simply had to try it (I have a big pile of jeans zippers waiting to be re-purposed). It took me a relatively long time to fixate the zippers, I hand stitched all the teeth individually, but this can easily be done in front of the television.

Feel free to leave a comment in the language you prefer (although Google translate might have to assist me if you choose something different than English, German, Dutch or Hungarian). 

Felting

Okay, I admit it, I am easily distracted and easily excited. Every time I see some new craft I kind a have to try it, and own all the things that are needed (I have a feeling more of you share this problem). A few weeks ago I came across felting crafts. I spend some time searching the web and found both needle felting (dry) and wet felting. The second type can be done in several ways, but the way that intrigued me the most was knitting wool and then wash it in a regular washing machine. I bought a small starting kit for needle felting and bought some felting wool.

The needle felting I used to spice up some crocheted ester eggs (this had been the original plan) but it was not as fun as I anticipated. I had read that you should not watch television at the same time while needle felting and this indeed seems a good idea. I of course tried it and hit my finger (a few times) with the needle. I also understand the appeal to watch tv at the same time because  the felting takes much more time than I anticipated. I did not fell in love with the craft.

I did use the material again a few weeks later when I bought my daughter a shirt of which I cut of a bow that I did not like. It turned out that the one that had sewn on the bow has not that great with the machine and had created hole while applying the bow (all shirts had the same bow so probably it was not put on to conceal the hole). I therefore ended up with a hole on her shoulder. I needle felted her initial on the place of the hole (I had seen on Pinterest that they directly needle felted on shirts to create an application). The T now perfectly conceals the hole, perfect.


The second felting project I tried was knitting myself a pair of slippers. It was a fun and quick project, I immediately bought a small package for a friend. If you have smooth floor like us (wood) then you will need to add some rubber patches on the soled of the feet to avoid slipping.