Come Join Me Over At Rhythm of the Home Today

I'm so excited! The new winter edition of Rhythm of the Home is out and I'm sharing how to carve your own rubber stamps over there today :)

So grab a cup of tea and enjoy all of the wonderful articles, recipes and crafts being shared and check out the giveaway over at the Rhythm of the Home blog that is going on today as well to kick off the new edition. See you there!

Hugs,

Rosina

Blue Ribbon Rosette ~ Tutorial

My daughter has a fun little my first pony book that she was given on her birthday a few years ago and inside was a game to play and little paper award ribbons to give to the first, second and third place winners. Well over the years the paper rosettes have grown rather worn and we've replaced a few ourselves but this time I thought it would be fun to make a really nice one out of felt that would really last and share the tutorial on how we did it with you :)

As this was supposed to be her project with just mama supervision I got her to do all of the tracing and cutting so you might see in some of the photos that there is a little bit of black ink showing on the tips of the felt ruffles :)

We started with a glass that was 3 inches in diameter, using it as our template for our ruffled rosette and traced twelve of them to be cut out of our felt.

Once our circles were all cut out we moved onto the next step of folding them into little triangular sandwiches by folding the circle first in half and then in half again just like in the photo above for just 10 of them....

and then started to space them as evenly as we could around one of the leftover circles.

This part is a little tricky so I helped her out and to make it a little easier on myself for the spacing I took four of the folded circles and placed them onto the base at the north, east, south, and west compass points so that I had a rough idea of how far apart to put the remaining pieces.

As you pin each one down you want it to overhang your backing by about a 1/4 to 1/2 an inch. You definitely don't have to be precise! But you do want to have that extra space so when you sew on your final backing at the end it will hide any embroidery stitching and so on that will be visible on the underside.

With all of the pieces pinned down she used a bit of regular cotton sewing thread and hand stitched all the way around the base of each of the points to tack them down in place.

DON'T remove  your pins yet! Trust me keeping them in will keep your rosette nice and stable as you continue to work on it :)

So with everything stitched in place we used a smaller glass, this time 2 inches in diameter, to make our rosette center. It really doesn't matter what sizes your glasses are as long as they are both roughly 1 inch different in diameter from each other.

She thought it would be nice to use a darker blue felt for the center and I agree that it really did make the rosette pop! 

I helped again with this part, embroidering the first place onto the felt with white embroidery floss and just using a running stitch to secure it to the front of the rosette.

You will notice that you still have one of your 3 inch circles from the very beginning left over and this is going to be your backing. You will also need to cut three strips of felt 5 inches long and 3/4 of an inch wide for your ribbon tails.

Position your three ribbon tails how you would like them to look and pin them onto the backside of your rosette with their ends far enough towards the center that they will be fully  hidden when the backing is stitched on.

To finish we just used regular cotton thread again and my daughter used a simple whip stitch to secure the backing to the underside of her rosette hiding all of our knots and not so pretty stitch work *grin*.  The final touch was to add a brooch pin that I luckily had but you can easily find them at any hobby/craft store or even your local dollar store may have them down the craft isle.

And that's it!

A super cute blue ribbon rosette for the winner in your household :)

You could personalize these with pretty much any little saying. They would make great birthday boy/girl ribbons, or don't forget about Mother's day that is coming up this weekend. I can see this with #1 MOM on it just for me *grin*.

Have fun making some :)

Hugs,

Rosina

Wet Felted Easter Eggs ~ Tutorial

Easter is just a hop, skip and a jump around the corner so today we got down to some serious crafty business and made some felted Easter eggs. I know that many of you probably know how to wet felt already but just in case you don't I thought that I would share how we did it :)

I love wet felting with the kids. It's such an easy activity and what kid doesn't totally love playing in the sudsy soap and water! So out came my stash of wool rovings and a couple of plastic easter eggs that I've been hanging onto for these kinds of projects and a couple of hand towels to soak up any puddles of water that might appear *grin*.

We started by stretching out some plain, undyed wool batting that would become the inner layer of our eggs. I really like to use the plain wool batting as filler for my felting projects because it is SO much cheaper to purchase than the smaller dyed rovings and you can use a lot of it without worrying about using up your stash of the good stuff.

Winding the wool batting around our plastic egg as tightly as we could we continued to add layer after layer, alternating the directions of the pieces with each new one added until it was about three times larger than it's original size and then we added a final layer over the white using some pretty pinks and blues to give our egg color. Make sure you create a good sized ball of wool because it is amazing how much it shrinks during felting :)

Next it was time to get down to the business of felting all that wool together. With the cold water running we dribbled a little of the water at a time over our ball of wool until it was nice and wet. It's important to treat your wool very gently at this point because the wool shifts really easily. So with a generous amount of dish soap on our hands we gently started to pat and rub our egg.

Working our hands around in circles all over the egg we gently agitated the wool until we could feel it starting to become a little more firmer beneath our fingers and then we started to alternate with cold and hot water to shock the wool fibers even more to help them knit together nicely. If you haven't tried this before you will definitely start to feel a difference. The fibers on the surface won't slip around as much, it will start to shrink up smaller and you will be able to rub at it with more pressure the firmer it becomes.

Do not worry if it seems like your wool looks really giant and sloppy over the plastic egg inside! My kids rolled their own eggs this time and I thought they would never shrink down but if you look at the above photos you will see how giant my daughter's egg was when she started and how small it was in the last photos. I did help her out at the end to really rub and squeeze at it firmly and I can't say enough about shocking it with some really hot water and then plunging it back into really cold water again all while rubbing it firmly. It really does help it to tighten up more quickly :)

When we were finished felting our eggs we wet felted a couple of little yellow chicks using the same method as above minus the plastic egg inside and then I tossed both the eggs and chicks into the dryer to shrink them up one last little bit and dry them.

The kids could hardly wait to pull them out of the dryer to see just how I was going to get the plastic eggs out from inside of them *grin*. With a sharp pair of sewing scissors I cut a jagged opening across half of the wool eggs so that they looked like they were hatching open and popped out the plastic eggs from inside of them leaving a perfect hollow center where we could now tuck our little chickies inside...

but not before we needle felted on their eyes and beaks :)

All finished and ready for playing with!

There was peeping and cheeping and chickies popping out all over the house all afternoon *grin*.

I hope you have fun making some of your own Easter eggs and chickies :)

Hugs,
Rosina

PS. Looking for more crafty ideas or inspiration? Pop over to Natural Suburbia's Creative Friday and see what others are up to :)

Gingerbread Snack Mat

With the snow falling outside and the cold temperatures I've been feeling really festive which is perfect because I have some holiday sewing that needs my attention *grin*.

I started going through my holiday christmas fabrics and found an adorable charm pack of Kate Spain's 12 Days of Christmas and a bunch of other scraps and started cutting little 2.5 inch squares to make a cute quilted border for a set of gingerbread men snack mats I've been wanting to make. With all of my squares cut I sewed strips of 5 blocks together using a quarter inch seam and then sewed it onto a 6.5 x 10.25 inch rectangle of natural unbleached muslin.

I can't claim this idea as my own though as I actually saw a photo of it on Flickr first but for the life of me I can't find it again to share a link to the original. So if you know who created this first I would love to know so I can give them credit :)

Then with a little paper gingerbread man that I had traced from a cookie cutter I copied him over and over onto the backing of my Heat N' Bond ultrahold that was going to be my glue for my applique work. This stuff is great for quick and easy applique projects :) Just iron it onto your fabric, cut and place it on your project and iron once more for a secure stick.

I love the natural look of the muslin and wanted to incorporate burlap into my mats to but burlap tends to unravel if it isn't stitched down well and washing can be tricky but I was crossing my fingers that the heat n' bond would do the trick. So I did a little test patch taking a chunk of burlap, gluing it onto some scrap cotton and it stuck on like a hot damn. Oh my goodness, that burlap is not going to move!

So with all of my little men positioned on my snack mat tops I took a dry iron to them and set them permanently in place. Just to be on the safe side I did topstitch all of them though so that they would make it through a round or ten in the washing machine *grin*.

With the addition of a little bit of adorably cute mini ric rac for their icing they were complete and ready to be sandwiched between a layer of organic wool batting and an 8.5 x 10.25 inch rectangle of muslin that created the backing to my snack mat. Using a 1/4 inch seam I stitched all around the outside leaving roughly a 3 inch opening at the bottom so that I could turn the whole thing right side out to be pressed and finished off with a topstitch all around the perimeter :)

I just love how they turned out and can't wait to make a few more because these ones were actually destined for a seasonal swap the kids and I participate in and are already wrapped up and on their way down to the US where they will be swapped around with other wonderful goodies and in return we will have a new little box full of all sorts of homemade goodness just in time for the holidays. I can't wait :)

Have you started your holiday sewing yet?

Hugs,
Rosina

Painting with Wool ~ Wet Felting

My little girl and I had fun today playing with some of our felt rovings and creating felt scenes :)

I know that many of you felt quite regularly but I thought I would take some photos of our progress today and share them just in case some of you are unfamiliar with how to wet felt wool :)

It's a really fun craft and you only need a few different colors of wool rovings to get started. We used corriedale rovings that I purchased here and you want to start by taking small chunks of your roving and pulling it apart evenly so that it is all fluffy and lay them down on a sushi mat or sheet of bubble wrap. Lay down one complete layer going horizontally and then repeat the process laying down your wool vertically and again the opposite way so you have three layers of wool.

Now you can get really creative and start adding the details to your picture :)

It's like painting with wool *grin*.

L wanted lots of flowers so we tried something new and cut out flower shapes from a sheet of the pre-felted craft felt and then placed a few loose strands from our wool rovings over them to hold them down as I wasn't quite sure how they would felt :)

When she had all of the final touches added we placed the wool covered mat on a cookie sheet, covered her picture with a piece of mesh and started to slowly dribble water all over it until all of the wool was wet. The cookie sheet will keep all of the water nicely confined so that you don't end up with a giant water puddle on your table :)

Drizzle a little bit of liquid dish soap over the top of your mesh and start to slowly and gently rub the surface of your mesh. You will start to notice that the wool begins to work together and doesn't move around as much under the netting. Make sure you lift the netting off of the wool every couple of minutes though as the wool fibers will start to work their way through the holes in the mesh and you don't want your picture to get stuck to the netting :) Keep doing this until all of your wool looks like it has bonded together well enough that you can lift it gently and it won't all fall apart.

Now that you have one solid sheet of felt, albeit a delicate one, you can roll your mat or sheet of bubble wrap up tightly with your felt and netting inside and roll it back and forth. This will squeeze out some of the excess water and continue to agitate your wool and help it work together even tighter.

Continue rolling for a couple of minutes, then stop and unroll it, pull up the netting to keep it from sticking to your felt and then turn the entire piece of felt 90 degrees so that when you roll it up again it will agitate the wool in a different direction from the last time. We kept rolling and unrolling for about 10 minutes and then I took the whole thing over to the sink and plunged it into hot water and then cold water a few times to really shock the wool so it tightened right up.

Now that you are all finished with the water you can unroll it, remove the netting and roll it up in a tea towel to suck out the excess water :)

And here is her finished picture. I think she must have had an Easter theme in mind with the little bunny in the flowers :) I just love how it turned out for her and tomorrow when it is completely dry we're going to hang it up on the wall.

Have fun felting!

Hugs,
Rosina

PS. Looking for more crafty ideas or inspiration? Pop over to Natural Suburbia's Creative Friday and see what others are up to :)

Fluffy Tissue Easter Chicks ~ Kids Craft

Easter time's a coming, Easter time's a coming.... *grin*.

I loved making these fluffy tissue chicks when I was a little girl, twisting little bits of tissue paper on the end of my pencil and sticking them onto paper in the shapes of hearts, chicks and other animals. I'm seriously just like a little kid when it comes the crafting! I can't wait to get in there and cut and paste along with the kids no matter what the occasion LOL.

Since Easter is actually just about here I thought we'd better get going on some special crafts! Out came the construction paper, odds and ends bits of tissue paper, pencils and glue and we got cutting :) This is such an easy craft with such cute end results that you've got to try it if you haven't before!

Cut any color of tissue paper into a whole lot of little 1.5 - 2 inch squares and then cut an egg shape out of construction paper or cardboard for each child plus yourself :) Next take one square of your tissue paper, place the eraser end of your pencil in the center of the square and pull up the sides of the paper and scrunch it all up around the end of your pencil.

Dip the end of your pencil into the glue...

then press your pencil end with the gluey paper down onto your egg cutout and repeat :)

You just keep squishing and sticking your scrunched up tissue paper to your cutout until you've filled the whole thing up and made yourself a fluffy little chicky :) We made ours look like our chicks were popping out of their shells on the bottom but you could even decorate them like easter eggs with different colored polka dots or waves and so on all over them. They make fantastic fronts for Easter cards to. So fun!! I just love the great 3D texture you get from all that tissue paper :)

I had a bit of yellow ribbon in the cupboard so I punched a hole in the top of each of them and threaded the ribbon through to hang them up in our family room window :) It was a good thing I wanted to hang them as it gave me incentive to finally take down the cinnamon stars that were hanging there from Christmas! I know I'm terrible aren't I *grin*.

Have fun making some :)

Hugs,
Rosina

T-Shirt Art Using Freezer Paper Stencils ~ Tutorial

One of my son's friends is absolutely crazy about the Mario Brothers, especially Luigi, and is actually having a Mario themed birthday party really soon. I couldn't for the life of me find anything to purchase though that had Luigi on it so I thought it would be fun to make him his own personal Luigi t-shirt :)

I love using freezer paper to make stencils so out came my big roll of butchers wrap :) If you haven't seen it before it looks just like brown craft paper on one side and the other has a shiny waxy side which normally is the side you would wrap your meat or other food to be frozen on but it also works as an awesome peel and stick paper for creating paper stencils!

You can cut it down to regular letterhead sized paper, 8.5 x 11 inches and run it right through your printer to. Just make sure you place it in your paper tray so that you print on the paper side and not the waxy side *grin*.

So I found a really simple image of Luigi online, printed it directly onto my freezer paper and started to cut out all of the pieces that I wanted to replace with paint instead using my exacto knife. A smaller craft knife works really well to and is nice for small areas but I have misplaced mine so I had to go with the big knife *grin*.

With my stencil all cut apart I was ready to start sticking the freezer paper directly onto a clean cotton t-shirt. I started by placing all of the pieces of my stencil where I didn't want any paint touching the shirt down with the shiny side touching the fabric. It is very important that you make sure the shiny side is facing the shirt because it gets very sticky when it heats up and you don't want to accidentally glue it to your iron!

Using a dry iron with no steam I ran it gently over top of the paper parts until they were all glued into place. It only takes a second or two for the freezer paper to bond to the fabric but you can double check all edges of your stencil before you start painting to make sure they are securely attached to the fabric so that no paint will seep underneath when you start. If you find a loose spot just run your iron over it again and press down a bit and it'll fix it right up :)

Now that you are ready to start painting you can either use a fabric paint or you can use any regular acrylic paint that you have on hand. I always use plain old acrylic paint as we always have tons of it and to turn it into a permanent fabric paint you just need to use a little bit of 'fabric medium'.

My favorite medium to use is Jo Sonja's but they were all out when I went to pick a new bottle up so this time I'm using the Americana brand. So for each color I wanted to paint with I used 2 parts acrylic paint to 1 part fabric medium. Mix it all together really well and paint directly onto your shirt :)

For my Luigi I wanted to do all of the black outline lines first so that is the portions of my freezer paper stencil that I removed and I brushed in a layer of black paint and hung it to dry overnight.

When I woke up this morning the first layer of black paint was nice and dry so I peeled off all of the freezer paper bits that were still attached to the shirt leaving behind all of the perfect white spots where I could now fill in all of the colors that make up Luigi's clothing and body :)

Section by section I slowly mixed paint and filled in the blanks. Sort of like a paint by number project *grin*. I think he turned out pretty well :)

Once you are finished painting everything, hang your shirt somewhere to dry again for another 12 - 24 hours to really let the paint cure.

I didn't quite wait the full 12 hours for mine to finish drying but I wanted to pull off the last of the freezer paper to just show you how it looks when you are finished :)

I love how you can create such detailed images by peeling and sticking little bits of paper to fabric like this without needing to do any sort of screen printing process.

Tomorrow morning it will have been a full 24 hours that my little Luigi has been drying and then I can use my iron on the no steam setting again and heat set the paint permanently setting it onto the fabric. I have had great success using fabric medium. The kids have quite a few shirts done that we did together and they go in and out of the wash constantly and look just as great as the day we painted them. Minus a few ketchup stains here and there *grin*.

Have fun making some of your own!

Hugs,
Rosina

PS. Looking for more crafty ideas or inspiration? Pop over to Natural Suburbia's Creative Friday and see what others are up to :)

Holiday Linky Love

The snow has been falling all day and it has me wanting to sing Christmas carols *grin*. Okay well maybe not quite yet but it does have me thinking about what gifts I want to make and what new holiday decor we can craft for our stash :)

I am loving these adorable miniature gingerbread houses!! I ran across them over at Not Martha and I can't wait to make some with the kids :) They will be perfect to perch on top of our cocoa mugs!

Need a good stash busting project for the holiday season? How about one of these fun fabric flower wreaths! Another perfect project to get the kids involved with as it is just fabric circles layered and tacked to an inexpensive vine wreath :)

These little yarn trees are so stinking cute *grin*. Now that I've started doing more knitting I've got little odds and ends of wool leftover from projects and I'm going to let the kids go crazy winding up these little trees. I think they will be a lovely addition to our nature table :)

And last but not least are these little trinket pouches that will be just perfect for my little guy :) I love the oversized grommets for attaching a carabiner to! I can just see him clipping them to his pant belt loops and filling them with his special treasures or taking them outdoors when we go for nature walks. I wonder how many rocks or pine cones we can fit into one of those little pockets *grin*.

What are you making this holiday season?

Hugs,
Rosina