Help me out and win your own pet quilt

I have absolutely no idea if this will work or how much people will get behind me, but I’m asking you to help me out, and I’ll give you something in return 🙂

I confess, I have a weighty credit card bill that is on my shoulders every month and has been for years. Even though it’s on 0% interest right now, the minimum payment is still around £200 ($315) a month. I want rid of it. SO what have I decided to do?

Well I’m asking you to help me. For every £1 you donate to the cause on THIS SITE (and this site only!) you will get an entry into my raffle draw for your own custom, turned edge applique, lap size pet quilt wallhanging of your dog, cat, goldfish, snake, whatever! I will draw the winner when target is reached, so it’s in your best interests to spread the word 😉

For donations of £5 or more (and £5 is the minimum annoyingly, I was hoping it would be £1!), not only do you get 5 entries but I give you this quilt pattern which comes with a table runner variation included…

And for donations of £10 or more you get ten draw entries, the Wallander quilt pattern AND a box of 6 trufflepiglet chocolates (UK only)… assuming you reply to my email with your postal address of course (make sure you check your spam folder just in case).

If you’re not in the UK and you want the chocolates, the donation amount is £15 because of the extortionate postage costs- sorry about that.

So yes, I would be enormously grateful if you donated, or even just shared the link to my GoFundMe page with your friends or Twitter followers. I’ve even made a button you may use wherever if you really want to get behind me.

Please link the button to this link: http://www.gofundme.com/creditquilt

And I will be posting little target posts every now and again to remind you 😀

Thanks everyone!

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Tutorial- Customised Plastic Tags

These are tags I made for Sarah at Fripperies and Bibelots, however I’ve decided not to make these for sale anymore so I may as well pass on how I make them in case you want them for jewellery, maybe cards or even little zip pulls…

YOU WILL NEED
Printable shrink plastic
Printer and computer
Scissors or a punch in the shape you want
Hole punch
Oven
Scrap paper
Double sided tape
Clear varnish spray

1) Make your layout on the computer. I use Photoshop and make a grid to put the text into. For little biddy sized ones for jewellery tags, I make a 1″ square grid, you can make rows of text instead or change your grid to fit different shapes. If you are using a punch, make the grid fit the shape. Bear in mind that the colours will darken so print colours a bit lighter and things will shrink A LOT. I can get 50-60 tags from one sheet. Most sheets of shrink plastic for printing are US Letter Size, so make sure your document is set up for that too.

2) Now print it! Leave to dry for a minute of two.

3) Punch out your shapes from your sheet or cut out with scissors. Please note if you’re not doing circles that sharp corners will stay sharp when finished and mean a lot of effort sanding them down. You may prefer to do that or you might prefer to round your corners off. To use the punch, take off the bit that collects the punched out bits and use upside down so you can get your positioning right.

4)  Take off the bit catcher from the hole punch and use upside down in the same way to the first punch to make holes in the tops of your tags. Try to leave at least 2mm from the top or the holes may tear when strinking.

5) Preheat your oven to 150 degrees C.

6) Layout the shapes on a clean baking tray so that they don’t overlap.

7) Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for about 2-3 minutes. They will shrivel up and then lay flat again. If you overcook they will go a bit yellow so it’s worth keeping your eye on them. Also please don’t be offended by my dirty oven! The ones at the back seem to bake a bit slower so keep your eyes on those. Just before you take the tray out of the oven , you can use a spoon to push them down and flatten them out if you need to.

8) They will cool pretty fast, so after a minute or two you can start sticking them to a piece of scrap paper ready for varnishing. Use the most low tack double sided tape you can, repositionable tape would be excellent if there is such a thing. The power of the propellant in the varnish spray will blow all your tags away if you don’t stick them down. However if you prefer a gloss finish and you want to nail varnish them instead, you won’t need to do this bit.

9) Spray with varnish outside, assuming it isn’t raining out there. I use car lacquer spray from Halfords for mine. Let dry and spray again. Once dry, peel off the sheet straight away to avoid stickiness from the tape staying on the back.

Ta da! Attached to whatever you want with string, jump rings, etc, etc….

Trials and Tribulations

I truly hate basting and the binding processes in quilt making. This quilt was a nightmare for so many reasons but I have learned a lot whilst doing it. (to balance this I will say that I love piecing and how all the patterns and colours work together!)

Things that have gone wrong and have learned:
– When I started piecing it I shredded the triangle bits. I learned to sew across the diagonal of the square and cut down the middle instead of starting off with triangles.
– I learned that when cutting up a charm pack to make blocks, lots of triangly pieces makes blocks smaller than those with lots of square bits and this then needs fixing with maths afterwards. I am NOT GOOD at Maths, so it’s a wonder I am in this business, frankly.
– Transferring an embroidery design to thick, stripy fabric is bloody difficult. Doing it freestyle makes your cat design look a bit frog-like. I do however have much nicer free embroidery writing than hand writing!
– Basting a quilt with spray mount is NOT THE SAME as using special basting spray. It makes your needles sticky-ick and then baby wipes become essential.
– Cleaning a drop loading bobbin mechanism is more complicated than the old fashioned type, it has many many many crevices it takes ages to get all that fabric fluff out.
– Check the back regularly so that you’re not folding the back fabric onto itself under your quilting (FAIL)
– Don’t free motion stitch on 0 tension, it looks baggy and horrible on the back and you’ll have to unpick most of it and start again.
– Use tough thread for quilting, but it doesn’t matter for piecing. THIS IS WHY YOUR THREAD SNAPS AND THE FREE MOTION DOESN’T LIKE GOING UPWARDS (biggest problem I had)
– Tough thread is super expensive but it is worth it. And you will run out of the colour you are using twice if you don’t buy more than you think you need.
– Seriously, I should go learn from a professional how to bind rather than learn from a book because I still have not mastered this skill and I still hate it. Though I am getting better each time, a little but always seems to break free and eludes me. And I am too lazy/time-poor to hand bind. This is probably half of the problem right there.
– Ultimately I have learned to go from a pattern that tells you how big finished things are going to be until I get a bit better., My imagination and ideas run away with me sometimes and I need to slow down. I am not a quilt genius yet!

But it’s done now which means I can move onto things I know I am better at. That and the mega quilt I need to finish in a week with some quilt as you go which is already going boobies-up and I’ve had to unpick once. I digress.

Here it is!

It that binding repair stitching you spy in the bottom left of this photo? Why yes, yes it is! Thankfully the only bit I had to do this time…

Jesus and his amazing multicoloured pendants

This is what is taking a lot of my time at the minute. I am making Jesus pendants for a regular wholesale customer. Never fear though, for I have finished day 1 of a resin experiment, which may result in a tutorial for you all next week!

Blythe pull rings and Halloween

I’ve made 5 pull rings for Katy‘s Blythe doll. Whilst I’m not sure what these actually do, I hope she likes them!

Also I realise it’s the time of year where Etsy promotes Halloween. With that in mind and also considering the time it takes to ship to America, I’ve revived some of my halloween items and they are back on sale as of today in my Etsy shop.

Work in Progress

I’m working on a custom order for an orange and apple bangle and earrings at the minute- it takes lots of resin layers and lots of clay slices and I’m itching to see the end result!

Custom order finished… and some other stuff

Firstly- and most importantly- I need to let you all know that the price of the moulds in my shop will all be going up 50p on 1st January because of changing exchange rates and customs charges. But the good news is that for the whole of January you can get 15% off everything (moulds/jewellery/homewares…) in my January sale with the code “jansale09”. I hope that makes up for it!

I thought I’d show you a custom order I made for Chelsea on Etsy. It’s a full size king chess piece made from pearlescent powder and blue resin, cut in half with text applied and a bail attached. The idea was for it to be a good luck pendant for Eric’s chess tournament, but I think the King piece is a little on the large size at 12cm, so it will possibly be used as some other kind of ornament.

In other news I have started making resin buttons, but not a clue on how to price them! Do you think 80p-£1 each (depending on size and shank vs holes) is too much?

Also you can see Fletcher is back to normal after his ordeal- he interrupted my photo session as it was what we like to call “Fletcher-time” where he gets upset if you do not devote 100% of your attention to him! He does still look a bit spaced in the pic but it was the angle I took it on, saying that he looks dopey most of the time to be fair!

Custom order part 3 and your help needed please!

The horse hair and ashes custom order is nearly complete, I just need to swap some of the findings for sterling silver ones when they arrive (hopefully today) and make the silver name bits. I think I should be able to add the full name to the pendants, but a small initial might be better for the bracelets.

 

I cast a block of resin in bands and then cut it and sanded it with the bands going across the ring. However I now think it looks a bit plain and is lacking something. Any ideas? Do you think I should sell them in sets of 3? They won’t be very cheap because of all of the sawing and drilling and sanding involved, so hoping there’s a way of selling them individually still. Maybe I should just make them thicker?

Make 50: Week 45 and custom order continued

My make for this week is this pair of earrings, they have fabric embedded inside which gives them an ornate sketchy feel.

I am progressing with the custom order I blogged about in my last post. The pieces are now sanded and polished (sorry for the flash I took it after 10pm last night), I drilled them this morning and started working on the findings, though I need some ribbon clamps and triangular clamps to be delivered before the bulk of the work can be done. I will also be making real silver name tags for them too, so there will be another update…

Custom orders

I have quite a lot of custom orders going on at the minute. I have a special project involving locks of baby hair with Jellybelly*Jellybrain plus trying out bubble rings with photos for a lady too:

Normally I can do photo rings with the flatter square rings I make, but we tried this as an experiment.

I’ve also been making two bracelets and two necklaces incorporating horse hair and- for the first time- ashes. I’m quite pleased how the ashes came out, it looked horrible and sludgy when I mixed them in, but once set, the heavier pieces sank to the front, giving a nice granite-y effect!

As usual I have a never ending pile of sanding to do! I’ll share some more pictures as I go with these ones.