How to make your own bunting

Last year we decided to redecorate our daughter’s bedroom and I immediately knew I wanted to add some homemade touches. Bunting looks really pretty when strung across a wall, between shelves or across the top of a reading nook - and best of all it’s really easy to make.

You need:

Fabric - you can use anything, a thin cotton material is easiest to sew and you can buy packs of ‘fat quarters’ which are squares of fabric in complementary colours or patterns fairly cheaply.

Binding tape - this is the special type of ribbon that you will sew the triangles on to.

Pinking shears - scissors that cut with a zig zag design. For some reason cutting out your triangles with these scissors means the edges won’t fray.

Needle and cotton - I also found a needle threader really useful

Paper or card to make a template

And that’s it!

To begin, decide how big your want the flags in your bunting to be - bearing in mind that you will lose a centimetre or so when you sew along the top. Draw a triangle shape on paper or card and cut out to use as a template.

Next cut out your triangles - you may find it easier to pin or tape your template onto the fabric.

Lay your binding tape across the top of the triangle and fold the fabric over. Sew along the strip to sew the binding tape into the triangle. Lay the next triangle on the binding tape - I found a gap of a few centimetres between each one was good - and repeat until you have done them all.

We used drawing pins to fix the bunting to the wall - our daughter really liked it!

'A New Home' Greeting Card

I must have made this card seven years ago because it has my address written inside when I moved house... to my home before this one! I moved in 2010 and had been making cards for a little while but it was before I started blogging. I made several 'new home' cards and wrote my new address inside them and sent them to family and friends.

I had one left over that I'd never sent, but it did have my address written inside. When one of my dearest friends told me she had moved in with her boyfriend and gave me her new address, I wanted to send them a card wishing them luck in their new home, but didn't have time to make one (every spare moment is currently taken up with coursework for a professional qualification I'm doing and planning my husband's 40th).

So I decided to use this spare card - it's not recycling if I never actually gave it to anyone! I cut the front off the card and mounted it on another card - a purple one to match the patterned paper across the middle.

To make the original card I used a small house-shaped hole punch to punch out houses in a strip of stripey paper which I stuck across the middle of the card like a ribbon. I had a pack of gold outline stickers with the words 'a new home' and also a lock and key which I used to finish off the simple card.

I'm sending this to Penny's Challenges for her card making challenge.

Embellished Photo Greetings Cards

You may have seen the family photo letter collage I already completed using my voucher from Snapfish, the photo printing people.
 

There was another idea I wanted to try, that uses a printed personalised photo from Snapfish but also allows for some homemade embellishment. I didn’t know until I started looking around the Snapfish site that they do personalised cards – you simply upload a photo and choose the card design. There are birthday cards, with the design already provided (eg an age, some animals and so on) or more blank, colourful backgrounds where your photo takes centre stage (you can also choose cards where you can add multiple photos). As well as personalised birthday cards they have a huge range for other occasions, some of which are folded cards you can write inside, and others are flat cards – like postcards, but used for save the date reminders for weddings and birth announcements and so on.

 

I chose a couple so I could experiment and see what they had, with the intention of using my craft supplies to add some finishing touches at home.

 

It’s my Dad’s 60^th birthday next month so I made him a personalised card with some family photos. There was a layout where all I had to do was drop in the photos:

 I wanted to add some extra embellishments so used a cardboard label mounted onto blue card saying 'for the world's greatest dad' at the bottom, and a silver outline sticker saying 'dad' in the top right corner. As the title of the card was 'birthday star' I put some silver star stickers in the top left corner as well.
 

 

My sister is in the process of buying a new house; I couldn’t find a layout suitable for ‘congratulations on your new house’ so instead chose a card saying ‘we’ve moved’. This is designed to tell people of a change of address but you can change the wording, so I changed it to congratulate my sister and her boyfriend on the new house. The space in the middle was to add a picture; if you were using this card to tell people you had changed address then a picture of the new house would be perfect! But as I didn't have that - my sister hasn't moved yet - and I wasn't sure what else to use, I decided she would like a picture of my cat! To me it looks a bit like the cat is peering through the letterbox :-)

 

Most of the 'new home' embellishments I had were too large to fit on this card but I did have a pack of stickers with clear backgrounds that I thought would work. It had a flower on it so I added some extra flower stickers around the card.

Personalised Christmas cards are a lovely idea, especially if you are sending them to family or friends you haven’t seen in a while. I didn’t really have any suitable photos from previous festivities (we don’t really do posed family photos) but I did have some nice ones of the holiday I took with my boyfriend to Lapland a couple of years ago. It wasn’t Christmas but there was still plenty of snow!

This card had a lovely background with snowflakes around the edge so I decided to embellish it with some extra snowflake stickers. You can't see them all too well in this photo but they are there!

Finally I used a collage layout for a birthday card and used pictures of different cakes I've made.

I embellished this using some little cupcake stickers on each point where the lines crossed:

 

All of these cards would be nice without the extra embellishments but I do think it's nice to add a little extra!

Thanks to Snapfish for the voucher code for their site