Embroidered handwriting

Print your text using your chosen font on a piece of paper.

Trace on wax paper.

Place the wax paper on you fabric and pin together.

Start embroidering over the wax paper.

When you're finished tear the wax paper off, do it by pulling it very gently.

All done!

Needles notebook

I sent a birthday present to T42 from one of the forums I take part in, I love her creations and especially the way she combines needle craft in many of them, that's why I chose to make a needle notebook for her and took the opportunity to take pictures of the process so I can post it here. It's the same as the black and white one I gave to Michal and posted last week.
T42 is the one that took the picture of the completed notebook as I sent it off before I had the chance to take a proper picture so thank you T42!
First choose your patterned fabrics, I like using 2 different ones, one for the outside and a different one for the inside but you can use just the one pattern.
Start out by cutting out 2 pieces of fabric, size 15X20cm (6X7.8inch) each.
Cut one of the pieces in half, now you have 1 piece size 15X20cm’ (6X7.8inch) and 2 pieces 15X10cm’ (6X4inch).

Cut out relatively thin and light iron-on interface, a piece for each piece of fabric, cut the interface a little bigger than your fabric to make sure it’s all covered. The interface will prevent the fabric from fraying at the edges.

Take out your ironing board, lay out the fabrics on the interfacing, note the glossy glue on the one side of your interfacing, you need to have the sticky side up and the left side of your fabric on top of it.
Iron just enough to make the fabrics edges stick to the interface (5-10 seconds), now flip and iron from the back side. Do the same with all your fabric pieces.

After it cool’s off trim the edges of all 3 pieces.

Take your 2 small pieces and sew the length just on one side. I used a dark color thread so you can see it better but rather have your thread the same color as your fabric.
Lay both small pieces on top of the larger piece (the right side of the fabric on the right side of the fabric) their sewn side turning inside and sew all round.
I added 2 pieces of ribbon on both sides before sewing together so I can later close the notebook by tying a bow.

Now turn it over to the other side, you will get 2 pockets.

Iron both sides, inside and out to flatten it.

Cut out 2 pieces of double sided thick interface and place each piece inside each pocket.

Iron from both sides until it sticks; this will create a harder cover.

Inside your notebook sew a piece of felt; I used the blanket stitch round the felt.

Embellish your cover and there you have it.

Next time I’ll show you how I embroider letters.

I'm going away for the weekend so if you have any questions I'll be able to answer in a couple of days. Have a great weekend!

Fleece & fabric scarf

How about a project for the weekend? It's the coldest day of this winter so far and is there anything cozier than fleece? You already know I am crazy for scarves so a combination of the two suits me just fine (-:

A few weeks ago I made a fleece scarf with fabric on both sides

Then I saw Aliner’s scarves, and I was inspired to make one using more than one fabric. Aliner creates the most magnificent things from fabric, I love her work visit her ETSY and her blog in Hebrew, even if you can't read it just look at the photographs of her work.

Start out measuring a 1.50m’ X 35cm’ (60 inch X 14 inch) piece of fleece, you can use a few colors of fleece; here I combined a piece of cream color as well as the main olive shade I used.

You can make it wider if you like wide scarves; take into account that the width measurement divided by 2 will be the final width of your scarf. Lately I like my scarves not so wide…
Choose your patterned fabrics, I purchased mine at Artishok, you can use as many as you like.

Cut out relatively thin and light iron-on interface, a piece for each fabric, cut the interface a little bigger than your fabric to make sure it’s all covered. The interface will prevent the fabric from fraying at the edges.
Take out your ironing board, lay out the fabrics on the interfacing, note the glossy glue on the one side of your interfacing, you need to have the sticky side up and the left side of your fabric on top of it (don’t you just hate it when you end up ironing the sticky side and it sticks to your iron?)

Cover with a thin cotton cloth and iron just enough to make the fabrics edges stay on the interface (5-10 seconds), now flip and iron from the back side. Do the same with all your fabric pieces.

After it cool’s off trim the edges.

Assemble all the pieces together with pins any way you want just make sure you lay the right side of the fabric on the right side of the fabric beside it.

Sew all the pieces together so you get one long piece.

Iron the stitches open, do it with a relatively cool iron and keep the iron mainly on the fabric and not the fleece as we tend to refer to fleece as fabric but it’s not, no fibers there, it’s closer to plastic then it is to fabric, it’s synthetic and can actually melt from the heat of the iron.

Now fold your scarf in half, all length, making sure you lay the right side of the fabric on the right side of the fabric, so that you get a long scarf about 17cm’ (7 inches) wide.
Sew all the way around leaving the bottom part open so you can turn your scarf to the right side.

Now turn it.


Cover with a thin cotton cloth and iron gently just to flatten it a little.

Now hand stitch the bottom part you left open.

And there you have it.
Good luck and enjoy (-:

Wondeful rings

Michal, a dear friend, taught me how to make these wonderful, simple to create colorful rings.
I hardly ever wear rings, not even my wedding ring that has been in the drawer for years but I loved these so I made a few.I'll probably give them away to others that will show them off and in the meanwhile created a tutorial just in case you decide you want one yourself.
Jewelry wire is available in many different colors and is sold in several sizes, called gauges, with the larger gauge wire being smaller in diameter. Use a 20 gauge wire (In Israel it's referred to as "Alpaka")and I must warn you that it hurts a bit to bend the wire round the bead, but it's only for a few minutes so it's worth it (-:
You'll have to Click every image to enlarge it.
Thanks Michal!
Enjoy!

Paper Doll

I have been planning to make one of these for ages and finally sat down to create one.
She is 25cm' high from toe to the tip of her crown.
If you want to create one of your own all you have to do is follow these simple instructions:

Print the template

Put it over the cardstock you want to use and trace using carbon paper.

Cut out all pieces, you need 1 of each. I used black and white cardstock for the legs and arms and plain white for the face and body as they are covered.

Punch out little holes where indicated the size for your brads to fit in.
Print out an image of a face, I used this site.

Use chalk to create a blush look and a red ink pen for a lipstick effect.

Glue the face to the face template and assemble all parts using brads.The brads enable motion so if you don't want your paper doll to be able to move her body parts you can just glue them together instead of using brads.

Now you can start to dress her, you can really go wild here, I cut out a dress shape from fabric textured paper and glued a piece of lace to the bottom of it.I then attached a ribbon to act as a belt with a bow shaped charm in the center and I also used fibers to act as a scarf, I just tied them round her neck.

Now glue the clothing you made to the body of your paper doll.

The crown is made of gold color cardstock cut into shape and I used crystals to embelish it.

I then gave her a key and glued a sentance from a book I liked:"I think this is the real key, to love what you do, it is often very difficult to know what you love to do because you want to do so many things" (see picture at the top of this post).

What can it be used for? I think I'm going to frame her and take her to work, can also be used on a greeting card but then you must make it smaller.

I will love to see yours!

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Granny squares

I love granny squares, when I was a child my mom made me a poncho from these granny squares, isn't it amazing that more than 30 years later I still love them and so does my daughter?A few days ago my friend Michal told me she took all her wool leftovers and started making granny squares for a scarf. As I have plenty of leftovers to say the least I began knitting, I use the following pattern, it's basic and simple, can change the color of the wool every line or every 2 lines or not at all.10-15 of these and you have a scarf, for a poncho it depends on the size, here's a diagram how to form a poncho shape.

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Crisscross scarves

I love winter, it gives me a chance to knit and the scarf is certainly THE winter accessory as far as I'm concerened. This year I created a few of these simple crisscross scarves, I gave a couple as birthday presents and made 2 for my private collection.
If you want one just follow these easy guidelines:

You will need a #5 hook and 1.5 packs of single color wool (100gr packs) and 1.5 packs of a thicker, more colorful wool for the crisscross.Chain about 300, it depends how long you want your scarf as this scarf is knitted across.

First line: sc in each chain (you can skip this line and start from line 2, it gives the scarf a nice finish but I created a few without this line and they came out just fine.

Second line-the end: chain 4, skip one sc from the first line, dc in next sc, chain 1, skip one sc from the first line, dc in next sc etc until the end of the line.

Turn over and repeat line 2.I like my scarves nice and wide so I knitted 17 lines but I found that you can make do with 12-13 lines, If you want a throw you can knitt 30 lines.

You basically get a net pattern.

When you reach the width you want, take your colorfull thicker wool (suitable for hook 8) and crisscross across the net. Start the first one from the bottom of the net and the second from the top.Crisscross 2 rows in every dc line.

Make a knot at the begining and end, you can either tie the 2 to one another or tie each to the first dc in the row.

Leave the wool hanging on the sides to act as a fringe, I like it when it's not symmetrical, but if you want you can always cut them to the same lengh.

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