Make Felt Fondant Fancies!

UPDATE: my felt fondant fancy pincushion tutorial is now available via Patreon. 

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Every month this year I'm sharing a free pattern with my newsletter subscribers, and April's project is all about cake!

April's tutorial will show you how to sew a felt fondant fancy to use as pincushion, display with your favourite vintage china, or give as a quirky gift to a friend with a sweet tooth.

I send out my free email newsletter about once a week, with updates of what I've been making and doing lately and links to my latest blog posts and tutorials and lots of creative and colourful things to inspire you.

Every email I send in April will include a link to download the step-by-step felt fancies pattern.

Click here to subscribe!

UPDATE: My newsletter has moved! Click here to sign up and see this month's free pattern.


P.S. Want some more teatime-inspired tutorials? Click here to make felt jammy biscuit brooches, and click here to make felt iced biscuit brooches. 

Adventures in Travel Blogging: A Trip to Bristol, part two

As promised, it's time for part two of my super fancy "let's pretend I'm a serious travel blogger!!" trip to Bristol (you can read part one here).

On this wonderful treat of a trip I was a guest of Mercure Hotels UK and stayed at their lovely central Bristol hotel, the Mercure Bristol Grand.  

Day two got off to an excellent start with a buffet breakfast. I can never resist a cooked breakfast but I have had so many incredibly sad cooked breakfasts in hotels over the years (cold beans, rubbery eggs, unripe tomatoes, ugh, so depressing). This was, however, the total opposite of a sad breakfast... a happy breakfast, I guess? Whatever. I would pretty much recommend this hotel based on this breakfast alone, it was well lush.

I also had tea and orange juice and fresh fruit and a really scrummy little pastry... and felt a little bit like I might burst from too much breakfast, but in a good way.

After breakfast, I checked out of my room and met up with the other bloggers on the trip ready for our tour of the city. The tour was led by Dan and Nina from Bristol-based blog Lifestyle District who had the difficult task of picking just a few Bristol highlights to share with us.

Regular readers will know that I used to live in Bristol (about 15 years ago) and now live just down the coast, popping to the city as often as possible on my days off... but there are huge chunks of the city I've not been to in what feels like forever, so I was really looking forward to seeing where Dan and Nina would take us.   

We started at St Nicholas Market, just round the corner from the hotel. Even though we were all still full from breakfast, the gorgeous smells of the food stalls had our mouths watering!

 

 

 

Next we headed to Bristol's harbour...

 

 

... popping into M Shed (the museum of Bristol's history) to visit the viewing gallery on the top floor, where you get some fantastic views of the harbour, the city skyline and the harbourside cranes.

 

We passed Colston Hall where a special mural was being painted to celebrate the venue's 150th birthday. We all took photos of the graffiti artist, he took some photos of us in return, then we walked on up the road...

... down the famous Christmas Steps and on to the wonderfully decorated Nelson Street, where you'll find creative hub The Island based in a former police station. 

Street art is an essential part of any visit to Bristol, so for the final part of our tour we headed up into Stokes Croft...

... to see the obligatory Banksy (you can't come to Bristol and not see a Banksy, it's practically the law) and to pose for a group photo. 

 

Then it was time to return to the hotel for Afternoon Tea - and lots of Instagram-ing, of course!

 

There was so much delicious cake! Scones and sandwiches too, of course (scones and cucumber sandwiches are an essential part of a fancy Afternoon Tea) but oh my goodness, the cake was so good.

 
I'm sure it will not remotely surprise you to learn that I ate a LOT of cake. As the event began winding down and people started bidding their farewells, I decided I'd better leave asap before I ate even more cake (theoretically I don't really believe in the concept of "too much" cake, but there really is only so much sugar I can eat before I begin vibrating like an oversized hummingbird) and headed homewards.

Huge thanks to the team at the Grand for the invite and hospitality, and to the guys at Lifestyle District for the tour!

Disclosure: as mentioned above, I was a guest of Mercure Hotels UK and received a free night at Mercure Bristol Grand and free meals during my stay, but this is not a sponsored post - I'm sure there are some lucky bloggers who get paid to blog about staying in lovely hotels but I am (sadly) not one of them. (A girl can dream though, right???)

Scraps, Colour Samples and a Crafty Cake

This week has been very hectic as I've been juggling a bunch of different projects - brainstorming ideas and pitching designs for a couple of deadlines, stitching and photographing things for another, plus doing all the usual crafty, bloggy, emaily stuff that goes on in my working week.

One of the projects I'm working on involves pretty Liberty fabric. The scraps are so pretty I can't bear to throw even the teeniest of them away! I must think up a way to use them for something crafty... hmm...

The dark weather this time of year makes photo-taking a challenge. There's just so few hours of usable daylight and sometimes it's so gloomy that "light" seems like too strong a word to use! I am currently dividing my schedule into "daylight" and "non daylight" tasks, so I can make the most of the light that is available before it fades.

A particularly tricky thing to photograph even in good light = neon colours, which I was working with this week. I did lots of experimenting with different backgrounds to get the neon shades to look right.

 

 

One of my "non daylight" tasks was to sort through some old sketches and project proposals, adding unused ideas to my box of "project idea" index cards. One set of sketches has some colour samples attached, which I thought were much too pretty not to photograph before I threw them away:

It has mostly been work work work work work here this week, but there has been time for cake (check out those button-shaped berries and "knitted" leaves!)...

... and for a flick through some copies of the wonderful UPPERCASE magazine.

I've been meaning to buy some copies of UPPERCASE for simply ages but after listening to this interview with the editor I could resist no longer and treated myself to some back issues plus the lovely Work/Life illustration directories.

They are going to be perfect reading material for evenings when I want to relax and soak up some inspiration away from the internet (I love you, internet, but too much of you is a bad thing!) and for when our yowly cat decides it is time for me to STOP WORKING AND GIVE HER CUDDLES THIS INSTANT :)

Work & Wildlife

I am still busy working - with lots of breaks for tea and cake, of course :)

Most of my own mugs are packed up in boxes (along with the rest of the stuff from my old flat), so I've "adopted" a couple of mugs from my parents cupboards (it's not just me who likes to use the same mugs over and over, is it?). This is an old one that belonged to one of my sisters when they were at school or University, I think... it's from a time of many essays and exams, anyway. It reads "I hate work I hate work I hate work I hate work" and every time I look at it I feel happy because I actually LOVE my job. Even with the occasional crazy deadline!

While on my tea breaks I have been enjoying staring out of the window at all the birds on the bird feeders. As I mentioned last month, lots of birds visit my parents garden.... and I was lucky enough to be sitting right next to the window with my camera when this lovely woodpecker paid us a visit at the weekend:

Which has reminded me that a few weeks ago I managed to get some snaps of a couple of deer sitting around in our neighbours' garden - just chilling out, thinking deer thoughts, planning their schedule for the day, etc. Aren't they lovely?

Tea Parties for a Great Cause

Regular readers will know how much I like a nice cup of tea and a tasty cake...

If you share my love of such things, you may be interested in taking part in the Blooming Great Tea Party campaign.


The tea parties are to raise funds for Marie Curie Cancer Care, a fantastic charity who provide care for poeople with terminal cancer and other illnesses in their own homes. Every £20 raised will pay for an hour of nursing care - last year's tea parties raised enough funds for 30,200 hours of care!

Want to take part? Click here to register, for more information and for lots of useful bits and bobs for your tea party like recipes, and printable invitations, donation forms, bunting, etc. (registration closes on 31st July).


P.S. the pictures in this post are of some cakes I baked a couple of years ago - for high-impact, low-effort cupcakes, nothing beats a pack of dolly mix!

Crafty Maths

A nice cup of tea and some homemade cake...


... plus a box set of Poirot mysteries...


... plus lots of sewing...


... equals a very relaxing afternoon!

The Urge to Bake

Thanks mostly to the inspiring baking done recently by my Flickr friend Gillyflower, I have been overcome by the urge to bake exciting things and make exceedingly pretty cakes.

I've not managed anything spectacular yet, but I have been shopping for some yummy supplies like these wonderful rainbow cake cases...... and I've temporarily satisfied my baking urge today by making up a batch of brownies. Out of a packet, but tasty all the same!

Custom Cakes

This morning I went to the Post Office to post a custom order for a trio of Felt Fancies and half a dozen Jammie Dodgers (including some with special heart centres). Of course I had to photograph them on a nice bit of crockery before I wrapped & packaged them...I've not made a chocolate-iced Felt Fancy before, only the pink and yellow ones as I thought they'd look nicer "in felt" but I think it turned out quite nicely so it may be added to my range sometime soon.

Hurrah!

Ah, if only elections here in the UK could feel that exciting...

I've been busy with non internet-y things today, so there's just time to mention that I've spotted what may be the first finished Christmas ornaments made with one of my tutorials (yay).

PLUS check out this fab shot of one of my felt fancy pincushions being used in the making of lovely notebooks over at TheLapwingPrintworks...... it makes me so happy to think that my crafty creation is helping make even more crafty things! :)

Confessions

My camera is being very odd today. I don't yet want to admit that it's broken (please please please let it not be) but it's certainly not let me take any photos :(

This means I can't show you what I worked on last night (some more hairbands, with large poppies and giant cherry blossoms like this) ...

Instead, I'm going to admit to my total and utter failure to stick to my Crafting 365 challenge during my internet-less weeks. I was doing so well! and then I got a bit distracted and I had my biggest crafting-free period since I started this last year. First up my neighbour had a nasty fall and we had to break into her house & accompany her to the hospital (she's recovering well, thankfully), getting back at about 1am. Then that weekend the BBC were in Gloucester filming for this year's Doctor Who Christmas special which was just sooo exciting, especially as one evening they filmed in my friend's house and we got to meet the lovely David Tennant. It felt genuinely a bit like Christmas, and all the excitement rather wore me out.

I did manage to get a little bit of crafting done after that - curling up on the sofa and slowly making loads of little thankyou cards out of scrap card and an old book of birds (days 243-7) - but without the daily 365 thing of taking pictures of my work and posting it on here, I rather lost momentum. I was getting to check my emails etc at work and at my friends houses but I couldn't work on my shop at home and it made me really feel at a loose end. Also I'd never really realised before the extent to which I rely on things like digital radio to keep me entertained while I sit and sew. Once I'd worked my way through my dvds I started to get rather restless!

So instead of sitting and sewing, I cleaned the house (it's honestly never been so clean) and tidied up and we had a huge clear-out of things we've been meaning to attend to in the spare room... Then after that I had a proper little holiday during a mini heatwave: lazing around in sundresses, eating strawberries and reading novels (I hardly get a chance to read normally, curling up with my sewing instead of a book before bedtime), and doing the first bit of baking I'd done in months. I used to bake all the time, and really miss it. It's one of those things which I wonder why I don't do it every day, it's so satisfying (and I do like a nice bit of cake).

All in all I think I had about three weeks off from making stuff before I picked up my sewing again (more on that when I can take photos again!). It felt seriously weird to start with, but in the end it was nice to step outside my felt-obsessed universe for a little while and focus on other things. Once I'd stopped being stressed about not being able to check my email, etc, it even seemed like quite a good idea. I am determined to keep going with this 365 thing, it's so much fun and has been so good for my productivity, creativity and working patterns, but in future I shall definitely be building "crafting free" patches into my schedule!

Right, enough wittering: back to the sewing...

365 / 228 - Sailboats and Cupcakes

Last night I watch some episodes of Doctor Who (very excited about the new series!) and made sailboats and cupcakes...
The little seagulls were my mother's suggestion. My mother is not only good at suggesting things like that, she is also a tea-fuelled painting machine! This is very lucky as the bathroom we're painting is large (almost as big as my previous flat, haha), none of the walls are flat (very old house) and the room is full of fiddly bits, weird doors, edges, pipes, all kinds of funny things to paint very very slowly... but it's pretty much finished now, hurrah:
The white looks lovely and crisp against the light wedgwood blue (it is a wedgwood blue, I promise! the photo isn't great) - how I thought it would in my head (phew) and perhaps even better. For my first ever bit of decorating it has gone quite well, I think. Now if only we can get rid of that awful frilly lightshade! It looks like the skirts of those frilly women people put over their loo rool and it is sort of welded onto the fitting having been there for (literally) decades. It will not budge. I may throw a small party to celebrate when we finally manage to get rid of it!

I am of course now itching to paint everything in the house, and am already casting my eyes over aspirational design blogs and delicious shops like H is for Home for just the right accessories for my dream retro-modern look... Shopping aside, an important part of this look is having much less junk than I do now: so I am doing my best to spring clean, giving things away and swapping them via the UK Etsy swap group. It's great clearing stuff out and knowing it's going to a new life in another crafty home! Ooh, and thinking of swapping things, before I sign off I must show you the truly delightful bird brooch I got in a trade from fellow Etsian Guerilla Embroidery:
I can't wait for the warmer weather so I can wear it out on my spring jacket. Too awesome for words.

365 / 183 - French Fancies and Finishing Things

I am determined at the moment to do two things. Firstly I need to properly restock my designs (many sold out in November and have not been made since! dreadful!) instead of getting distracted by shiny new stuff all the time. Secondly, I need to actually finish the things in my big box of half-finished projects. The shoes embroidery was rescued from this box a couple of weeks ago and now it is the turn of some fake fondant pincushions...
As you can see, three yellow ones (the yellow ones are the yummiest) finished and some pink ones in-progress instead of just in pieces as they have been for many months. Someone bought me a box of the real ones last week and I thought "oh, I must finish those pincushions! then I can use these as props in the photos" (I'm loving props at the moment). Of course the cakes didn't last the week, but at least I've now finished some pincushions. I think it's best to wait until the pink ones are finished and ready to photograph before buying another box of cakes, as I will seriously be unable to resist eating half the box and those things are not cheap!

Oh, and last night I also finished the jammie dodgers from the night before (still no photos yet) and the little batch of foxes which sat without faces for a few days. Lots of sewing, most wonderful. I've also been doing a few sweet-tooth-pleasing sketches for new designs, but must resist trying them out for as long as I can or all these projects will get abandoned again... Want a hint? Well, check out the awesome wedding cake I stumbled upon whilst doing research on Flickr:

365 / 176 - An Explosion of Pink

I had great plans yesterday, but by the time I sat down with my paper and pencil and big pile of felt I was too tired to make any of them work properly... so I made a start on restocking my "I love tea" pins and played around with words and shapes for possible badges...
I like tea. Can you tell? The square brooches remind me a little of the medals on Jim'll Fix It. Hmm... Here's my whole workbox from the evening, along with discs cut out ready to make "I love tea" badges in colours other than pink - much as I like pink, I think I may need a break from it after sewing that lot together!

365 / 93 - The Ignoring of Plans

So yesterday I said "I am planning on making little penguin pins , finishing that little pile of tree stumps and also working on lots of oak leaves" and then yesterday evening I did none of these things! I didn't even start any of them! I faffed about most of the evening, tidying up a little, listening to the radio and leaving my dinner in the oven while I was busy nattering on Etsy (oops). I did get a little bit of sewing done though, clearly influenced by all the cake I have eaten this week (I am having a very sweet toothed phase at the moment) - cake slice brooches:
One is Victoria sponge and the other is coffee cake I think (or perhaps chocolate? any thoughts?). I'm quite pleased with them, but now I want to bake a sponge cake!