What you can create with half square triangle blocks

Posted on 25/11/2011 by eve

In the mug rug tutorial I used some half square triangle blocks and just sew them next to each other to make simple rows. This mini tutorial is just to show you what you can do with half square triangles.

You can make some pinwheel blocks, they just look so cute for a baby quilt:

You can also make a chevron quilt which I think look fab (might be doing one soon, look out for the tutorial!):

or why not let your creative mind run wild and create whatever tickles your fancy!

send me pics of your half square triangle blocks if you want!

3D shapes

Posted on 24/11/2011 by eve

My younger son is in reception and is learning about shapes at the moment. So when we came home from school I wanted to create an activity relating to this particular topic.

Here is what we’ve done, you will need: a pack of midget gems (value ones are just perfect), cocktail sticks and that’s all!

All you need to do is put them together to make a cube, pyramid, cuboids… we had great fun making them and talked about the number of corners, faces, angles…. hope you’ll enjoy trying this at home! Here are a few pics:

Halloween decorations

Posted on 24/11/2011 by eve

I don’t know about you, but my sons were really excited about Halloween. We spent a whole week creating decorations in order to wait patiently for the trick or treating that was so desperately expected. My eldest had tons of ideas: a bunting, paper bats, pompoms spiders and a scary sewn scenery… i was quite impressed! Off we went into Brighton to buy some cheap Halloween fabrics and felts. I cut some triangles out of the fabrics and he decided they should go as a pattern. I sewed one half and he did the other… Well, he had enough after the second triangle but, hey… I’m happy he sat down to do it at all!! He’s only 6 after all. Still, he was very encouraging of me finishing it off and loved the end result!

i also bought a foam wreath and I wrapped it with the different Halloween fabrics.

We then made some paper bats and you can download the template on the BBC website. We used black paper, white and red coloring pencils. perfect!

So Xmas is approaching fast (faster than I thought) and I’m pretty sure they will ask me to decorate the house for it… Any ideas anyone?

recycling

Posted on 22/11/2011 by eve

When I had a clearance in my husband’s wardrobe i found myself with a huge pile of unwanted T-shirts… I gave most of them to a charity shop, I threw away the really bad looking ones and kept 4 or 5 good looking ones as I had a little project in mind. My little kiddies needed some lap blanket to sit on the sofa while watching TV.

I cut out some big squares from my hubby’s Tees and sew them together. I asked my sons what they would like on their blanket and some of their requests were expected and others a bit funny (an apple….). I looked into my kiddies cupboard and got some Tees that were too small/ dirty/ ugly… Draw the desired shapes on some bonder web and ironed it on their Tees, cut out the shapes and ironed again on the big squares. I had some towel fabrics from a project I never got round to do, so I used that for the backing. Sew them right sides together leaving a 5″ space, turned it over and stitched it closed. Et voila, a nice and quick recycled project! Send me pics of your recycled projects if you want to.

don’t you just love fabrics!

Posted on 21/11/2011 by eve

So, after a long day of scrubbing the house down (yeah me!), I got a reward: I received “It’s a boy thing” fat quarter bundle by Michael Miller through the post!! I just love it! I have 14 FQ so my sewing machine is gonna burn!

My eldest son asked me for a quilt to go on his bed about two weeks ago, so we looked on the net for some super cool fabrics and boy did we find plenty! But I had to breathe and calm myself down since when it comes to fabrics I get overexcited.Finally, our hearts set on this fab collection. There’s no question about it, my son’s favorite design is:

All we need to do is find a cool design (after all my son’s a proper Dude!) and I can get cracking. I think I’ll make up a couple of pillows to go with it. Any ideas anyone?