Pudding Hearts

Another day, another feature of our work over at Crafty Ribbons. This time it was Mum's puddings!!

Mum's forever stitching together "this and that", so much so that we've got a whole christmas tree's worth of decorations...just no tree ...yet!! All it takes is for one tiny little spark of an idea and Mum's got the needle and thread out again!!

When Ali from Crafty Ribbons posted up the Vintage Christmas challenge, Mum knew exactly what she was going to make before she'd even been sent the ribbons!! She'd had an idea in the pipeline for quite some time...she just needed and excuse to make it!!...Cue Ali and the challenge, and the rest as they say is history!!

You can find the original post from Crafty Ribbons here or you can just look here...

Yep, Mum hand stitched all three of those puddings...added them to the ribbon we received from Crafty Ribbons and topped them off with an extra bit of their Christmas greetings ribbon...and there you have the beautiful hanging puddings!! We've not got any to hang up at our own home yet, but I'm sure it won't be long before they too are added to the ever expanding Christmas goodies filled area of the house!!

Little x

A Month Of Posts ... Too Early?

The sun is shining and I'm itching to get outside ... I am actually itching as when I was sorting the garden out yesterday I seem to have been bitten by something or another!! ... but back to today. It looks like it's going to be a hot day today. I really do love summer with hot days spent in the sunshine wearing flip flops and eating ice creams. There's another time of year I love too though ... Christmas!!

I know, I know! I can hear you all shouting at me! Oopsies too early to mention the C word? Well when you're a crafter Christmas (Sorry said it again) is never far from your mind. It's the one time of year that seems the most magical to me. It's all cold and snugly with lots of cups of hot chocolate and cosy slippers. Not forgetting the presents of course! Today's project I'm afraid comes in the shape of Christmas gifts. Mum, Lady and I were shopping the other week and saw something we all knew would be perfect for a project we'd been wanting to try. With a little bit of ribbon and a bonus decoration or two, we came up with these ....

Anyone guess what they are??

Yep, they are indeed wine bottles with their winter jumpers on! Perfect little Christmas gifts we think!

Plus when you add the little Christmas felt decoration, when the wine has all gone you'll still have the decoration left!

They don't just have to be Christmas gifts either. With a little bit of tweaking and one of Mum's rosettes added you could even use them for the jubilee... 

Although of course with it being summer and celebrating Britishness you might want to swap the wine for a bottle of Pimms!! 

Ooo now then, talking of the jubilee. As I mentioned a few days ago, Ali over at Crafty Ribbons has a new celebratory Jubilee inspirations blog. They're still running their daily craft goodies competitions too, lots of fab stuff to be won! Ali's featuring a lot of our work on her own blog for the next two weeks too. Yesterday she featured Mum's jubilee candle ...

Cute isn't he? Today's feature was this ... 

A few weeks ago whilst cleaning out some old boxes Mum came across some old Cross stitches she'd made years ago. The little soldier was one of them. The find was perfect timing as he got added to our jubilee goodies list! All the ribbons are of course from the Crafty Ribbons Jubilee selection that Ali generously donated! 

I have a very special project to share with you tomorrow that we're extremely proud of, but for now I'm heading out into the garden to catch some sun!

Hope you're enjoying the sunshine too 

Little x

A Month Of Posts ... Thankful

Over on docrafts, the blog topic today is "What are you thankful for". Isn't that obvious? I'm more than thankful for discovering crafting which is mainly due to Lady. Without Lady I'd never have gotten into crafting as much as I have. Without crafting I'd spend a lot more hours of my days rather bored! Crafting gives us more reason to spend time together. Shopping trips turn into "hunt the craft shop" trips, whilst meeting for coffee has turned into "let me show you my latest project"!! Crafting even allows us the ocassional weekend trips away to exciting places like Birmingham!! Ok, I'll admit Birmingham may sound rather dull, but in the crafting world it's a pretty big thing as it's where we get a lot of ideas and spend a heck of a lot of money on all new crafting toys whilst sharing good times and giggles along the way. If you're as lucky as us you'll even get the odd freebie or two from our friends over at Crafty Ribbons . Not that we ever expect it to be free ... it's more that Ali doesn't let us pay!!

Ooo talking of Crafty Ribbons, if you have a little spare time pop over to their jubilee inspirations blog. Ali and the team are running daily competitions to win lots of craft goodies ... not to be missed if you're a crafter! Each day Ali's posting up some of the projects her and the team have made to go with the themes. A while ago on one of our "craft outings" Ali promised to send us a selection of their jubilee ribbons to play with. As always, she didn't disappoint us! We've made quite a few projects using her beautiful ribbons which over the next two weeks she'll share with everyone. In fact yesterday she shared the picture of Crusty's cupcakes. ...

They really were as yummy as they looked!! You can find the post Ali featured them on here.

Ok then, onto today's project. At the start of the week I made this card ...

It was a bit of a last minute request as it was needed for just two days later. Thankfully I got it finished in time, and I think it turned out rather well. Today is Jennifer's 30th birthday. We hope you've had a lovely day Jennifer and liked your card as much as us.

Little x

Black White and Green

Ok, please bear with us on this one ... this is our first entry into a challenge blog, so I'm really hoping this works. Crafty Ribbons (you might have figured out by now, we've got a bit of an obsession with them!) have set the challenge of "black white and one other colour", so we chose this card as our entry ...

This birthday card was created by Mum (Sharon) who it's safe to say has a bit of an obsession with all things green, so it was obvious her colour of choice would of course be green!!

Hope you all have a great weekend. 

Little x

More Crafty Baby Projects

It feels like it's been so long since we all put our minds together and came up with our baby projects for the Crafty Ribbons Baby Challenge. So much has happened, we've almost forgotten about them!! The next phase of our baby projects have been released over on the Crafty Ribbons Blog  today though and this time they're from Crusty and Lady (Lindsay & Mel).

You can see just how pleased Ali from Crafty Ribbons was with them and read all about the fab comments she got about them at the recent craft shows over on their blog. So what were the projects?? 

Well first up there's this pretty little pram card made by Lady ... 

she's used all the styles of blue and green ribbons to make the shape of the pram, added some buttons for wheel and then finished it by stamping the word "baby" in her very pretty patchwork stamps (I'm still trying to steal those stamps!!). 

Lady's second project was this ...

very cute little bodysuit and matching hat. Would believe this little white bodysuit and hat started out in poundland?? Nope, thought not!! Lady sat for over an hour hand stitching all the pretty pink ribbons and bows into place ... and believe me there was a lot of huffing when she couldn't get the bows to sit right!! 

Last on today's list of projects is Crusty's first ever challenge entry ... 

Apparently this project caused Ali so many problems at the shows. All her customers wanted to know if it was a kit they could buy or where they could find the pattern!! The day we were at the Olympia show Crusty was standing right beside Ali when one of her customers asked that very question!! Crusty looked so proud of her creation as she explained to the lady it was a free pattern for the feet that she'd sound thanks to google. Not bad for a first attempt huh Crusty? It was such a confidence boost for her, she was grinning so much that day!! 

So these are the second release of our projects we entered into the challenge ... yep, there's still more to come!! We'll update you all again when they're released over on the Crafty Ribbons Blog.

Little x

Baby Project 1

Remember how we teased you about some of our recent projects in the last post I published?? Well now I can share the first of those projects with you. To be fair I should really have shown it to you a couple of days ago, but we've been so busy here at Craft Towers getting everything ready for Mothers Day it's been a little bit too hectic!

If you remember, we were making projects for another of the Crafty Ribbons' Challenges. Crafty Ribbons is a one off family run company based in Blandford. Over the past couple of years we've ordered and brought rather a lot of ribbons from them. They're not just a business though. Ooo no, when you order from Crafty Ribbons you know who you're ordering from. Ali and Tony! How do you know?? Well everything has that personal touch. They have their own website yes, they want you to buy from them yes, but they also want to inspire you to do more with your crafting. How?? Well they also have a blog that you can follow where Ali regularly updates you with ideas from both herself and her customers. Not only that, but they also run weekly competitions to win their product free of charge as well as having regular challenges. Through those challenges is how we've gained a lot of confidence in our crafting. This is in fact our third challenge with them now. Ali sets the theme of the challenge and sends you some freebie ribbons to craft with. All she asks is that you send her two items you've crafted for that theme which include the ribbons she sent... simple!!

The most recent challenge was a baby theme. Although a little confused as to where to start, we eventually made 11 projects ... just a few more than the required two!!! This is project number 1....

It's a small set of drawers that contain a "New Mum Survival Kit". Each drawer has one of the listed items contained in it. There's 12 in total although the actual baby of course doesn't come with it!! Lol!!. So what's in it?? Well ... 

Hopefully you can read that list. Looking at it now I can honestly say I'm very proud of my creation.... looking at it when I was working on it though I can tell you I hated it!! I couldn't get all  the drawers the same size, the y weren't sitting straight ... everything that could go wrong did ... in fact after about 4 hours working on it I threw it all in the bin and walked away from it!!! As you can probably guess, I did retrieve it from the bin and managed to salvage what I'd spent hours working on. Not only that, but I got it all to go right in the end (well almost!!). It may have caused me a rather large headache but I'm still very proud of that little box creation. 

The best bit about those drawers is decorating them ... I used 4 different little tatty teddy images on each of the sides ... 

So that's it ... my first little set of baby drawers. Cute, even if I do say so myself!! Although thankfully it's not just me that thinks so. Ali at Crafty Ribbons liked them enough to feature them on her blog and named ME as her guest deisgner of the week! You can check it out over at the Crafty Ribbons Blog here. How honoured am I?? ME! A DESIGNER!! Honestly you couldn't get the grin off my face haha!! 

Well that's it from me today. I'm now off to finish my own Mothers Day cards ... downside of being a designer I guess haha! You make everyone else's projects before your own!! I have tried something a bit different with Mum's this year so hopefully she'll like them... if not I'll just keep them for me!! There's plenty of Mothers Day designs over on our facebook page though and I'll add a few more of them here after Sunday. 

Happy Mothers Day to all the Mums 

Little x

New Challenge

We got a lovely surprise in the post last Saturday morning. The postman put a little blue envelope through our letter box here at craft towers. It was the kind of envelope that only comes from one place ... Crafty Ribbons!!! But we didn't order anything ... no no as Mum had left a comment on the Crafty Ribbons Blog saying she was bored, Ali, the owner very kindly sent us a selection of ribbons for a new challenge that she launched on Sunday 19th Feb ... we got a special preview and instant admission to the challenge, but no instructions on what the challenge was!! How special did we feel!!

Our creative crafty brains automatically kicked in ... "it might be an Easter challenge" ... "maybe it's a Mothers Day challenge" ... "Or it could be a spring challenge" ... The possibilities were endless and we already had ideas of what we could do if it was any of those. On Sunday the challenge was officially launched and it was ... "baby washing" .... Ooo how we didn't expect that. So there we were Sunday morning with every one of our ideas useless ... now what?? Well there was only one thing for it ... board meeting!!!

So on Tuesday, Mum, Lady and I all met for coffee and put our heads together (not literally!) and started brain storming. By the time we'd finished our coffees we had far too many ideas and definitely not enough time!! 7 hours later and almost all of our challenge goodies were complete. This time even Crusty put down her baking spoons and joined our crafty challenge!!  ... wanna see???

Sorry did I not mention you can't see them before they're posted on the official challenge blog?? Ooo well consider that a bit of a preview ... I'll update you again once you're allowed to see all of our makes.

Little x

Featured Again!!

Here at Craft Towers, we're all so excited today. Our makes have been featured on our favourite ribbon seller's website for the third time now! Ali, the lovely lady from Crafty Ribbons gave us some free ribbon to play with when we met her at the NEC back in November last year. As soon as we got our Christmas crafting out of the way, we were sat searching for inspiration and these are what we came up with ...

Even Tatty tried to help out! You'll find more photos of our makes either at Crafty Ribbons here or on our facebook page here