Project 2: Garlands

Tonight’s gathering revolved around pretty little circles of colour run together with thread. Old books and music scores were sacrificed along with paper, felt and gauze. The jackpot was a strange art book discovered a second hand store – page after page of glorious patterns! Working as a team and drawing inspiration from a tutorial on Curbly, we created 8 different 2.5m garlands in the space of three hours.

Here is Kate’s fantastic Random Selection garland (below left), Amanda's good old Christmas Flair garland (below right) and Jess' ethereal Shades of Grey garland (also below right).

This is Kate constructing her vibrant Colour Frenzy garland (below).

And finally, a group effort on Amanda's Symphony in Blue (below).

The strings of garlands were the start of a garland bonanza, that led to a garland rainbow-esque mobile, that flutters beautifully in a kitchen breezeway. Amanda.

Solo craftiness: a teepee for a wee girl

These fabric teepees are so expensive in the shops, so I decided to tackle one myself for my littlest daughter's first birthday. I found a teepee pattern on the McCalls website, and it was simple to follow. Ikea has such a fantastic range of affordable, heavy drill cotton, it was so hard to choose. I got something with an evenly distributed pattern, so that it didn't matter which way I lay the pattern pieces down as I cut it out. I found some clear sewing plastic (there's probably a technical name for that, but I don't know what it is) and even made windows in two panels!

I bought timber dowel lengths at the local hardware shop (they even cut them to size for me) and painted the tops pretty pastel colours using old housepaint samples. There are rubber stoppers on the tops and bottoms of the dowel to stop it being rough and scratchy, and also to help them grip the floor.

I even bought a torch, and hung it upside down from the top of the dowel, so that the teepee is illuminated, and the kids have loved this (until the torch runs out of battery, which happens quickly because they never remember to turn it off of course).

To use the teepee you just prop open the dowel until the panels of fabric are taut. Putting it away is so simple too, you just scoop it together in your hands and I store it leaning upright in a corner, so it's not in my way when the kids aren't playing with it.

I loved this project! Kate.