Gift Wrapping with Old Photo Negatives

Do you have a box of old photo negatives from the days before digital cameras?

Strips of negatives from family Christmases, summers holidays and other special memories make quirky and nostalgic gift toppers.

For these pictures I used a gift that was just the right size for the photo negatives, but of course your negatives probably won't perfectly fit your parcel like this! You can trim them to fit smaller gifts, or add several negatives (with thread either side) to larger parcels.

It's really easy to attach the negatives to your gifts. Cut two long pieces of embroidery thread or yarn (one for each side of the negative strip) then use a large sewing needle to thread them through the holes along the edges of the strip.

If you want, you can then add a second thread colour for extra detail. Once your thread is nice and neat, use the excess thread at each end to tie the negatives to your parcel, knotting them securely then trimming any loose threads. You could attach one or two strips, or a whole row for a striped look.

Once the parcel is opened, you can all have fun holding the film up to the light to see the images and explaining to any kids or teens in the vicinity what these strange little dark pictures are and how you all used to take your family snaps with this thing called "film" back in the day.


Don't have any old film negatives, but love the retro photo look? Click here for a how-to on making Polaroid-inspired cards and gift tags featuring your old family photos.

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Childhood Treasures: Handmade Dolls Clothes

When my mother was a little girl, she had two special dolls: Chloe and Emily. Chloe was bought for my mum, and Emily had been my grandmother's doll when she was a little girl. Later they were both passed down to me and my sisters, and we played with them and dressed them in a lot of the same clothes my mother and grandmother had.

We were sorting through a box of old dolls clothes and other bits and bobs recently (deciding what to keep for my niece and nephew to play with, what to send to the charity shop, and so on) and I couldn't resist taking some photos of the loveliest handmade things to share with you guys!

My grandmother made this dress for Emily, using off-cuts from the outfits she made for my mum and her brother. "I had shorts and a blouse in that fabric", my mum says.  Aren't those tiny pockets adorable? You've got to love a dress with pockets.

Then here's Emily's silky pajamas, complete with pretty lace trim. I have very vivid memories of dressing Emily in these pajamas to "put her to bed" at night!

As well as Chloe and Emily, my mum had a few other smaller dolls which didn't survive to be passed down to us - but their clothes lasted and we used them to dress our modern plastic dolls.

My grandmother made this dress (with pockets and super cute piping details) for a doll my mother's aunt sent her from Canada. 

This outfit belonged to the same doll, but my mum isn't sure if it's one of her mother's creations. She remembers having some clothes in a very similar fabric as a kid, though, so chances are these were sewn by my grandmother from more dressmaking offcuts.

These clothes were sewn by my grandmother from a kit, for another small doll. Maybe someone in your family bought the same kit and stitched these, too?

Chloe had some handmade dresses too, of course!

A pretty yellow dress and matching knickers (love that collar)...

... and a floral print dress, with a stylish waistband:

When I was a baby, my mum knitted me this cardigan and matching hat, mittens and booties... and when I outgrew them, they were inherited by Chloe! I spent many happy hours dressing Chloe in these, buttoning and unbuttoning those buttons to get her ready for all kinds of adventures.

Finally, what did Chloe wear when we tucked her in at night? Not a chic pair of pajamas like Emily, but a sweet floral nightdress.

My mum took Chloe with her to boarding school - she had a homemade nightie in this floral fabric and a matching blue dressing gown, so my grandmother made a matching set for Chloe! How adorable is that?

Fancy reading about more of my childhood treasures? I've also blogged about Sylvanian Families (and the handmade furniture and other things we made for them as kids), my shell collection, my badge collection, my sticker album, my eraser collection, Fuzzy Felt, Keypers, lots of puzzles and games, some of my most beloved childhood books, and a bear I stitched for my sister when I was eight.

Childhood Crafting: Sylvanian Families Furniture

As well as making felt fashions and lots of mini fake food for our Sylvanian Families when we were kids, we also decorated our homemade Sylvanian houses with handmade furniture. Here are some of the things I made for mine (recently rediscovered in a box in our attic).

Kitchen cabinets and an oven!

 

Shelves made from matchboxes, old tissue boxes and the trays from chocolate boxes; beds made from card with faux-woodgrain sticky back plastic headboards; mini cupcake cases for lampshades; off-cuts of carpet and fluffy fabric for doormats; a sofa made from tights packaging; and pillows made from scrap fabric sewn round cotton wool balls.

I think you would call this look "recycling box chic". I had a big box in the bottom of my wardrobe full of little cardboard boxes and other stuff I thought might come in handy for making stuff... and this is the sort of stuff it became.

The kitchen units are particularly adorable. The happy hours that must have gone into making them!

The counter-tops are made with off-cuts of vinyl flooring from my parents' DIY projects, and the cupboards are all decorated with faux woodgrain sticky back plastic.

The oven has an extractor hood (another bit of vinyl flooring) and cardboard hot plates on the hob (there were originally four, one seems to have fallen sometime in the past 25 years). The doorknobs are brass fasteners from the stationery department and the doors open and close.

The cabinet is made from an old toothpaste box, the drawers in the cabinet are made from two matchboxes stuck together...

... and there's a matching chopping board, too (made from a rectangle of vinyl covered in yet more sticky back plastic).

The kitchen sink is a little cardboard box lined with foil and sunk into the top of the cabinet. The foil looks quite thin (not like kitchen/baking foil), so I guess I must have saved it from something like a KitKat.

Who needs a store-bought dollshouse when you have a fancy kitchen like that?

Missed my earlier posts about this box of treasures? Click here to see my Sylvanian Families collection, and here to see the food and fashions we made for our Sylvanians when we were kids. 

Childhood Crafting: Fashions & Food for our Sylvanian Families

In the box of Sylvanian Families stuff we found in our attic, there was some Sylvanian furniture and some Sylvanian Families themselves (of course!) ... but the real treasures were the homemade bits and pieces we'd made as kids to accompany the store-bought stuff.

As you can see, I've been making things from felt for a looooong time.

I stitched these very stylish hats, shawl and bag for my rabbit family - and I also replaced the buttons on Mr Rabbit's dungarees when they fell off, and knitted a cosy wrap for Grandma Rabbit (luckily small pretend rabbits don't care how bad you are at knitting). 

 

I distinctly remember making a wedding dress and veil at one point, and one Christmas I carefully (and secretly!) made hats and jackets from felt for all my sisters' Sylvanians, wrapping them up in teeny handmade cardboard boxes which I then hung on the Christmas tree like ornaments. If those fashions ever turn up, I will be sure to take photos to share with you all.

As well as making clothes, I made lots of little things to decorate my (homemade) Sylvanian house.

Anticlockwise from bottom left: pieces of fabric that sat in a basket next to the sewing machine;"flannels" for the bathroom; an umbrella stand (for the paper cocktail umbrellas my parents brought back from a party) made from half a cocktail stick box covered in faux-woodgrain sticky back plastic; "skeins of yarn" made from embroidery thread and yarn; a paper fan; a beaded "necklace"; and two tiny "letters" which were tucked in the drawer of the dressing table.

My sisters and I loved making stuff from Fimo and we made lots of fake food for our Sylvanians to take on picnics. Fake fruit, fake hamburgers, tiny fake sandwiches and fake iced buns (complete with fake cherries on top). So cute!

I also made some tiny packets of food for the kitchen shelves. Each packet is a tiny handmade box, filled with toy stuffing (to help keep its shape) and decorated with tiny pictures and text like "ingredients" and "best before".

Top row: Jelly, Sugar Cane, 400g Lentils, Flour, Cheese & Noodle Soup.
Middle row: Carrot & Cauliflower Soup, Cornflour, Icing Sugar, Tomato Soup, Vegetable Soup.
Bottom row: Birds Eye Custard, Self-Raising Flour, Selection of Fruit Herbal Teas.

Look how teeny they are!

Good work, younger self, good work.

My Childhood Sylvanian Families Collection

More treasures from our attic clear-out: Sylvanian Families!

I definitely collected Sylvanian Families more than I really played with them as a kid.

My sisters and I each had one family - mine were the grey rabbits. My parents used cardboard boxes to build us an apartment block style dolls house, with one vertical row of boxes each which we could decorate as different rooms.

We used carpet and wallpaper off-cuts and mixed our store-bought furniture (all lovingly, carefully chosen after much deliberation and on a limited pocket money budget) with homemade things.

I just loved looking at all the teeny pieces. A bookcase with tiny books! A bath with a teeny cork in the plughole! A sink with a tiny bar of soap! A sewing machine with little scissors and reels of thread.

Drawers that really opened! Charming old fashioned furniture like a dressing table and a rocking chair and a fancy rotary phone!

It was such a joy opening up a box and finding all these things... especially as I'd also kept some of the handmade furniture and accessories we'd made. I'll blog about those soon, they definitely deserve their own post.

In the meantime, check out my posts about other rediscovered childhood collections:

My shell collection...

... my badge collection...

 

... my sticker collection...
 

... and my eraser collection.

You might also enjoy reading about puzzles and games from my childhood, more childhood treasures, Fuzzy-Felt Fairytales and beloved kids books.

Childhood Sewing: A Funny, Fantasy Creature

We got some more boxes down from the attic recently. There were lots of long-forgotten childhood treasures inside, including this weird little doll/puppet/creature I made in primary school about 25 years ago:

I think we had a class project to make something inspired by the film The Dark Crystal (?)

Whatever the brief was, this was what I came up with: a lumpy hand-sewn, hand-painted creature with a big nose and big floppy ears.

Here's the other side:

 

Kinda cute, kinda strange, kinda awesome.

I'm glad to have rediscovered him!

P.S. Last year we found this bear in another box: I stitched him for my sister when I was eight. Click here for more pics and to read all about him.

Nostalgia, Negatives and a New Project

I'm slooooowly editing lots of photos at the moment: some for blog posts about my Nice Days Out, some for a new Book of Craftiness... and some so I can get them professionally printed and put them in actual photo albums.

I've got half a shelf of photo albums but they pretty much stop at the date I bought my first digital camera (around when I left University... which was a while ago now!).

Digital photography is great. Of course it is. Instant photos? That I can easily edit and share? This is magical stuff!

But I can't help but miss the simpler days of finishing a roll of film, and taking it to the chemist (or popping it in the post in one of those pre-paid envelopes) then waiting for that exciting moment when you get to see how your snaps turned out.

Realistically I'm probably never going to go back to using a film camera (do local chemists even still offer cheap next day photo processing like they used to??).

During a recent bit of decluttering I even cleared out the box of negatives I'd been collecting for years "just in case" I wanted to reprint a photo or two. Guess what, younger self: you never, ever did.

Although I might not be able to go back in time or willing to give up the perks of all this shiny modern photo-taking tech, I can still have albums full of photos!

I've made a few photo books of special events (like my sister's wedding) over the years but I'm determined to gradually get my everyday snaps of family and friends and cats out of the (metaphorically) dusty depths of my laptop and printed and into the pages of an album or two.

I've been planning to do this for simply ages (literally years) but I am resolving to devote the time to making it actually happen this year.

Real photos, stuck on real pages with those lovely little old fashioned photo corners and handwritten captions to help me remember who was who and what was what.

What could be nicer than that?

Fuzzy Nostalgia

Remember all those puzzles and games hidden away in our attic? Well, brace yourself for a bit more childhood nostalgia because...

 

... we found a box of Fuzzy-Felt!

What fun this stuff was!

We spent hours and hours and hours as kids re-arranging these little felt pieces and using them to tell all kinds of stories.

Sadly they don't stick to the board any more, and some of the pieces are definitely showing their age.

It feels totally wrong to just throw them away though, so I'm thinking maybe I should make something from them? Maybe combine them with some plain felt and patterned papers to make some nostalgic cards to send to my friends? Hmmm...

I shall add the pieces to my box of "random things that might be useful for a crafty project sometime" (every crafter has a box like that, right??) and see if/when inspiration strikes!

P.S. You might also enjoy these posts about board games, toys, books, erasers, badges and stickers from my 80s childhood :)

Childhood Sewing: A Bear for My Sister

Our attic clearout continues. This weekend's rediscovered childhood treasures included a box of soft toys belonging to my youngest sister, including the very first bear my mum bought for her when she was a day old (awww).

One of the teddies in the box was not like the others. His nose is very wonky, he's not very well stitched and his stuffing is showing but his reappearance still prompted squeals of delight. He's a scrappy teddy bear I made for my sister when we were both very small!

  
I was in primary school when I made this, I'm guessing maybe ten years old? (Update: my mum reckons I was actually about eight).

I loved sewing and one of my mum's friends, who did lots of dressmaking, would sometimes give me bags filled with fabric scraps to sew and craft with. There were some lovely velvet-y scraps in one of the bags - I wanted to make a soft, cuddly bear for my sister, and this fine fellow was the result.

 

His nose is a button I repurposed from a craft project we did at Brownies (the crafts were always my favourite bit about Brownies). His body is an old handkerchief, and he's stuffed with fabric scraps.

I didn't follow a tutorial or make a pattern, just stitched him together as best I could from the fabric I had. The result is very lopsided but quite charming, I think? My sister loved him, anyway!

 

It's delightful to have rediscovered this bear after all these years, especially as I now I design and make stuff like this for a living :)