I have been trying...

I had such good intentions on Sunday night. I'll admit I am something of a Buzzfeed fanatic, but a recent post called (temptingly) 31 Insanely Easy and Clever DIY Projects. I think it was the 'insanely' part that drew me. These are not just normal DIY projects, the are so easy it is actually crazy.

Somewhere in the distance, I heard a gauntlet being thrown down.

Loads of the ideas caught my eye, but it was the promise of ombre nails in a flash that really tempted me. I love nail art but have so far been restricted to crackle and glitter effects. The ability to paint accurately on a sloped surface smaller than a five pence piece is not a skill I have quoted on my CV for obvious reasons.

Picture credit - thenailasaurus.com

Look at it. Success in ten easy steps. It's INSANE how easy it is.

You will not be surprised to learn then, dear reader, that I ballsed it up. I had planned an amazing blog post about how you should definitely follow this amazing tutorial, but in actual fact I ended up looking as though I had pressed a washing up sponge onto a damp manicure (which, I had).

I'm not defeated yet. I will try again. Until then, let me know if you have more success.

DIY Wedding Invitations

I've been waiting to write a blog post about my invitations for ages! They've been the biggest crafting project I've had for months and took an absolute age to make. So now they've all been sent, received and RSVP'd to (apart from the laggards, you know who you are!) I can let you in on how I actually made them.

You may want to frame yours when you realise the hours of toiling under a hot sewing machine lamp that went into them. To maintain anonymity, and avoid any gatecrashers, I've blurred out the important bits. Sorry chaps.

So. To begin. I made a sample back in August and, to be honest, alarm bells should have started then. It took about three hours, start to finish, and I only had one. One!  However, unperturbed I carried gallantly on and went shopping for all of the ingredients.
This included -

• Acres of ivory card of exactly the right size and weight (oh yes, you measure card in weight! Who knew?)
• Double-sided sticky tape (obv)
• Black wool
• A hot wax gun (sounds dangerous doesn't it? The woman in Hobbycraft just started at me blankly when I asked for directions to one)
• Black sealing wax
• A sealing wax stamp with appropriate initials
• Miles of black thread
• Fabric (which I already had. Oh, so thrifty!)

The first job was printing all of the buggers out. I will spare you the details, but it was painful. On a separate note, did anyone else know there where three different sizes of A4? No, me neither!  Once printed I trimmed them all to the right size and began cutting out and attaching the fabric. The aim here was to create a band of colour at the front and a handy pocket at the back - ingenious! So after hours of toiling, here's what I ended up with -

 and another from the side to get the true impression of the size of the pile.

From here I attached three lengths of black wool with a twist in the middle. The boyf helped a little on this job, purely so that he could claim the invitations were a 'joint effort' I think. Here is my wonderful workstation about half-way through the mammoth task.

The final step was to machine stitch a beautifully neat line around the whole thing. I'll be honest, about five invitations in, I was desperately regretting this design feature. However, once done - perhaps 30 hours later - I think they looked rather good. With an artistic flourish the boyf added the wax seal and - ta da - the finished invitation.

Now repeat the first few infuriating hours with the printer to get the inserts and RSVPs sorted. With just over two months to go, it's time to kick the planning up a gear.

See you next time!

Happy New Year post!

A belated Happy New Year, we're all back at work now. It's been all change here, with new job and new car on one side, and a complete company rebrand on the other meaning we don't really know whether we're coming or going.

Where do you work now?

Eeerrm... just give me a sec, it'll come to me...

In line with this new name came a new look and we no longer have a smart dress code in the office. Cheers went around the room. Huzzar! We can finally wear jeans and a t-shirt! I was less excited about the news having spent my Christmas vouchers on two new work dresses. Plus - and here is the real nub of the issue - several hours of confusion making myself a pencil skirt.

Now when am I going to wear it?!

Anyway, I'll give you a little run down on this now entirely redundant skirt. It started life as a pair of trousers. Now, although I do love a good pair of jeans, I just don't like work trousers. I always get that horrible feeling that I look like I should be at school. And considering I wasn't the coolest ice cube in the freezer, that's not an entirely pleasant vibe. So not wanting to throw them away, I decided to breathe new life into them.

As you can see, not the most flattering of trousers. Why do I always convince myself wide-leg will look good on my spindly pins? I started by pulling the hems down and then unpicking the stitching along the inside seams and the crotch. I then got out my pins (the other type) and set about raising the waist, lowering the hip-line and pulling together the old inside seams to create a basic skirt shape. I also moved the zip fastening from the front to the side, but I left the buttons at the front for a bit of detail.

After - carefully! - trying it on, I shuffled some of the pins around and then put a tacking stitch in bright red so I could see it and unpick it once I was finished. After that I took to the sewing machine and, slowly at first, stitched along the red line I'd left.

Once done, I tried it on again to make sure I'd not made any major mistakes and it fitted! Amazing! The next step was to iron it and hem it - possibly the trickiest bit. I hate hemming. I made a mistake here by accidentally sewing wrong side up, which means the dark grey bobbin thread was on show, rather than the matching mid-grey thread (I was too frugal to throw away what was already on the bobbin). However, I think it actually looks quite good and I think I may sew another line a little bit above it to echo the stripes on the waistband. But here is the finished item -

Please also note my beautifully festive Christmas socks! I think I did a relatively good job for a pretty major project, but I'll have to wait until my next job to actually get round to wearing it for work.

That's your lot for now - happy sewing!

Phili x