Bunting Wrapping Idea

My MIL is coming to visit next weekend and to save on postage in May for Mother's Day, I have her pressie all ready to give her.

I am a big fan of bunting at the moment and this was the best I could come up with in 5 minutes :)

Happy crafting!

Pillow Case Box

I ditched school work today in favour of some crafting :)

Here is my creation; A fabric box made using an old pillow case and some cardboard!

I started with a plain white pillow case from the thrift store. We live in a tourist town, so lots of plain white hotel linens end up at the thrift store. Woo-hoo!

I trimmed off the band at the open end of the pillow case and later used it as a handle on the box.

I then sat the pillow case on the counter to create a flat base. I rolled down the top part so that I could see the corners. It's exactly how I made the tiny fabric box in this post.

I then marked straight lines across the corners...

Difficult to see the pencil marks, but they're there!

Then I sewed along the pencil lines.

The triangular flaps were long enough to sew together, so I did :)

Here you can see the box standing up, but it has no support.

Inside of the box...

(note: this is a great time to attach a handle to the box. The band I cut off at the beginning worked well - but I forgot to take photos of this step! I also should have ironed it, but didn't realize how crinkled the finished box would look.)

To give it some support, I used some cardboard I had lying around.

I made a box shape using the cardboard...

 

... Then stretched the pillow case around it...

... Then shoved the base to the bottom and hid all the rough edges.

I glued the excess pillow case (the raw edge from taking off the band) back up inside the box. I then glued the base of the box around the bottom edge to keep everything in place.

Here it is looking tidy-ish:

Ta-da!

The bottom of the box:

Inside the box:

I saw some similar boxes at Home Hardware for $7 each, but this one took me 25 minutes to make and cost me $1.50.

And because it is plain white, it's a blank canvas to decorate. Flowers, accent fabrics, labels... the possibilities are endless. How would you decorate it?

Happy crafting!

Shamrock Accessories

Apologies for the long delay between posts - I am officially back at school, doing my Master of Education degree (part-time and externally) but still working full time. All spare "crafting" time has simply disappeared from my schedule... a small compromise for a better education, I suppose.

But, given that I still work with children in a creative environment, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to do something for St Patrick's Day.

Here are my 5-minute Shamrock Accessories :)

I used:
Green string
A tiny scrap of fabric
A safety pin
A headband
My glue gun

I wrapped the yarn around two fingers to form two diagonally opposite leaves then tied them in the middle.

I repeated the same to create the other two leaves and bound them to the other leaves.

The loose ends were tied together.

I wish I had photos to demonstrate, but my fingers were (literally) tied up.

I used hot glue to attach a safety pin to the back and covered it with a tiny scrap of fabric so the glue had something to attach to.

For the headband, I just tied the loose ends around the band. No glue necessary.

And there you have my St Paddy's Day accessories. I wore the headband and attached the pin to my green sweater. It took me a total of 5 minutes and fully intend to use them again next year :)

Happy crafting!