Pink and Purple Butterflies

These were made a little while ago - but are so pretty I just had to share them.

They're almost too pretty to eat.

Almost.

All buttoned up

Can a simple button become a piece of stylish jewellry?
These pictures say they can.

Sources
Necklace
Cuff
(Mid) Make a button ring
Make a necklace
Necklace

Gathering with an overlocker

When I bought my overlocker (aka - serger) I didn’t realise how many cool things I could do with it besides finishing seams. My favourite is gathering – ruffling a piece of fabric is soooo easy now.

I’m going to show you how to do it on my machine, you should be able to follow the general principles to do the same thing.

First you have to make some adjustments to your settings;

1. Turn the tension of your needle threads almost as high as they will go. I found that when I turned it all the way up the threads were a little too tight to sew properly.

2. Turn the feed up as high as it will go. This way the feed feet will bring in the beginning of the fabric quicker than they get rid of it which means that the fabric will naturally ‘buckle’ as it goes under the needle.

3. Turn the stitch length to be a bit longer than normal. My machine has a mark at about 2 and a half for normal sewing. I switch it to 3 and a half.

And that’s it.

Now when you feed the fabric through to sew a seam it gathers as it sews.

 You will need to experiment with your machine to see at what rate the machine gathers it. This is what the same fabric looks like before and after it has been gathered.

Also – don’t forget to put the setting back to normal when you finished – otherwise you’ll be ruffling stuff you really didn’t mean to.

Peonies

At work we got in a few peonies for our artificial flower range. I fell in love - a cream and purple peonies arrangement is just beautiful.

Some peony inspiration;

References

bouquet (can't find)

bouquet

headpiece

buckets

bouquet

Lace Flower Headband Tutorial

I created a tutorial for a lace flower headband. You can download the tutorial for the headband here. It's really easy, a great beginners project and the instructions show how to make different sizes.



The kits are also available in the Purple Frangipani store, it includes everything you need to make it and also includes a higher quality version of the tutorial (I wanted to limit the size of the document so it's quicker to download - but it does affect the photo quality).

If you use the tutorial I'd love to hear what you think of it!

Stitching Cards

Once I started sewing on cards, it was a little hard to stop :)

Lunch Box Creativity

Who knew lunch could ever look so cute? I just discovered the wonderful world of Kyaraben.

Ham lamb with fruit and salad from Karen Hoh

Gorgeous Pandas from LuckySundae

Flower sandwiches from Susan Yuen