Monday 26 January 2015

New Forest Frost

Welcome back! Have you had snow? We haven't which is a bit disappointing, but we did get some heavy frost and managed to get out and see the ponies on the New Forest moorland. But first some snaps of a couple other walks we did.

Testwood Lakes

Splashing in puddles at Testwood Lakes
The Manor meadow across the road.
Evening ponies.
We had a bracing walk at Testwood Lakes and then we fed the ducks (and seagulls) at Blackwood. We were just leaving when some ponies came over for a drink.






We also saw this cute little Robin.


The New Forest seems to have quite a lot of surface water and little ponds here and there. This one had frozen over.

                                                   






Early morning frosty footpath in the Forest.
A female pheasant out for a wander.
Frozen puddles.
Steamy breath pony.


 I have also managed to do a bit of crafting. I made a little snowball blanket for Little Sparkle before she was born and now I have been given a Flower Fairy panel I am using the rest of the fabric up to make her a quilt to match it.
 So far I have cut my flower fairy fabric into 12 inch blocks and the plain 12 inch blocks were then cut into quarters. These quarters were placed in the corners of the 12 inch blocks and then sewn across the corners diagonally.

Leaving a quarter inch seam allowance I trimmed the corners then the trimmed off triangles were sewn together and pressed open into small patches. All four excess triangle patches for each block were then arranged into pinwheels. The 12 inch block corners were pressed open to make snowball patches.

Hopefully I will have a little more to show you on my next blog post! I hope you enjoyed this post,

love Amber x x x

Tuesday 6 January 2015

A New Year (Frozen costume, hand made crafts, sunsets and stuck ship!)

Welcome back, I hope you had a lovely Christmas and New Year celebration. 
Here is a little catch up blog post showing some of the crafty things I was up to before Christmas (and didn't have time to post!)
Big Sparkle announced two days before that Princess Elsa and Anna would be at her school Christmas fair and she simply had to have a Frozen dress to wear when she met them. Yes, that is lovely but those dresses cost about £20 (or £60 if you look at the really posh ones in the Disney Store). Sorry Cinders, looks like you wont be going to the ball for a while...
Cinders to Snowflakes. I covered the Cinderella badge with a snowflake and the front panel with some icy chiffon.
Making the cape.
I printed some snowflakes onto fabric and ironed on some bondaweb. I must admit it was a bit of a sloppy choppy job in that I sort of measured it then gave up and cut the cape fabric by eye. I think it was about 75cm by 100cm. I ironed on the snowflakes to the sparkly blue fabric then added a bit of zig zag stitching to secure.


Next I stitched the silver fabric over the top and added a ribbon with loops at the top edge. Then I added some pretty snowflake buttons to the bodice so the cape could be buttoned on.

We used a spare strip for an icy effect plait.
Meeting a real princess!
So there you have it! And meeting the Frozen princesses was far more exciting than meeting Santa. At first I thought it was kind of a shame but then I thought, you know what, I would rather encourage her to enjoy the girl power princesses than get her to sit on some old guys knee...besides his costume wasn't as good as ours.

Making stockings.
 Here are some bits I did using felt. Its so easy to use and really bright and bold so the kids love it!
I also made a little Christmas tree with european beads as baubles to decorate.



I found the sweetest stocking buttons and knew they would be perfect to use on my personalized fabric printed cards so I made a little collage of Victorian cards for this fireplace scene.

And I made this Dr Who fabric printed diary cover with cute instructions on how to tie a bow tie and a Gallifreyan alphabet on the inside edges of the book covers.

Inside the book cover.
Outside book cover.

You may remember my post a while ago titled Ice Cream Please! Well here is the final picture and it turned out pretty cute if I do say so myself.
Sewing on the sequins.
Sweet picture for a sweet little girl.


We had a lovely sunset when we had finished some Christmas shopping in Southampton and the cranes for the shipping containers on the way back looked good in silhouette.

Southampton

We visited family in Cornwall over the festive period and squeezed in a visit to our favourite, the Eden Project. We had a nice surprise when the Rainforest biome had 'snow'.



Beautiful frosty ice crystals.
Snow in the Rainforest Biome.


Walking back after a lovely day. 
Eden at night.

I will leave you with some pictures of the grounded Hoegh Osaka ship. You can read a bit more here .

The view from Calshot. Lots of people walked out on the spit to get a closer look. 
A panorama showing the ship on the left and all the people that came to see and take pictures. 
The view from Lepe Country Park.
I hope you enjoyed my latest post and I hope you will pop by again soon!

Love Amber xxx