Easter Bunny Shirts

For Easter this year I made my little niece and nephew matching Easter bunny shirts.

I made my stencils on my silhouette machine with contact paper (vinyl), it makes it a lot easier to paint as you don't need to worry about the stencil moving. 

The super cute bunny image on the top shirts is from the blog Petti Bear - although the intended use is as a wall sticker. I think it is great for tshirts too :)

The bunnies on the bottom shirts were from the Silhouette Online Store - unfortunately I didn't iron the paint properly and some of it washed off. Luckily it still looks cute :)

Wood Burned Cat Spoon

I just had to share this photo...

This is Chaos, he is one of my foster cats (most likely that sentence will have the word "foster" removed). 

Chaos decided to "help" me photograph one of the wooden spoons that I burnt a cat design on. What normally happens is that I start clearing space to take a photo or start a craft and all of a sudden one of the cats decide it's the perfect spot to sit/lay/sleep/play. Luckily this time he was in a good mood and let me sit the spoon under his leg. Funnily enough the first time I showed him a wooden spoon he attacked it, I guess there have been enough of them around my house that they are huggable now.

This spoon and a second one I made were Christmas gifts for the ladies who run the rescue that I foster for (plus toys for their cats).

Mosaic Trivet

For my older sister's birthday last year, I had a brilliant idea to make a mosaic tile trivet.

Why is it a brilliant idea? Because I've never done mosaic before, or anything to do with tiling really. Turns out I didn't enjoy it that much, mostly because it was a bit of a pain trying to evenly line up all those tiles since they shifted when I removed the spacers. And because I have all these grand ideas in my head, I bought enough tiles to make quite a few trivets!

Luckily it turned out well, since my younger sister wanted one for her birthday (hence the buying of extra tiles). Even better, they both have the same colour schemes for their homes. 

Because I had basically everything I needed, I decided to make one for my mother in laws birthday as well - in greens of course as that is her favourite colour. I completely forgot to take a photo of that one.

While I was making a huge mess I also made one for myself. I made mine bigger with smaller grout spacing and I have a lot of tiles leftover...

More Cushions

I'm starting to think that cushions are my thing when it comes to sewing. Maybe because they are easy, the fiddliest part is the zip and it is put in right at the start so if you mess up it is easy to fix. Little dresses and such tend to need buttons and generally sewing the buttonholes is right near the end - if I messed that up the whole thing would be thrown in a drawer until I muster up the courage to try again!

So I will stick with cushions when I want a quick sewing project (or need room for more fabric). Plus since all my pets like sitting on cushions new ones are always a good thing at our house. The old ones get a second life as new indoor pet beds, then the old pet ones go outside for Trixie's kennel. 

Totally random story, but I have to share it; when Trixie was a puppy she used to drag her old bed around the yard until she found the perfect spot to have a nap - cushy beds are far more preferable to grass.

Now I have four new cushions for our couch, sized a little bigger than normal. Have you ever noticed that cushion inserts are quite expensive? Especially when you can generally buy two cheap pillows for $5. Granted, being cheap pillows means they don't have a lot of stuffing.

What I do is make a square cushion cover using the measurement for the shorter side of the pillow. Then just shake that pillow till the stuffing settles into a squared off shape and squish it into the cushion cover. Easy, and best of all cheaper than cushion inserts!

Woodburned Knife Block

Every time I go to Ikea, there are so many things I want to buy and by the time I get to the register I'm dreading the total. So I mentally take note of all the things I want so I can think about it for awhile before buying.

One of those items was their RETRÄTT Knife Block - an item I don't actually need since I already have a knife set with a block. Plus I wanted to burn a design on it and I wasn't sure if I could due to the lacquer.

Eventually I bought it of course, then it sat on my desk for ages because every design I tried to draw on it just wasn't right. Until I decided to get out my flower stencils and draw a few of those on. Then googled flower drawings and sketched a few of those in the gaps. So I started burning, drawing in more flowers, stems and leaves, then burning some more until I was happy.

Because of the lacquer, my pencil drawings rubbed off very quickly so I had no choice but to draw and burn flower by flower. Ordinarily I like my projects to be perfectly planned, but luckily this one turned out great and most importantly I enjoyed doing it.