June Gifts and July Crafts

We had quite a few birthdays in June. I really am hopeless though and often forget to take photos of gifts before I give/send them. I did it as recently as yesterday. So I don’t actually have photographic evidence of some gifts, like my little brother’s…

But, for the birthdays we celebrated in June, I made the following gifts…

As well as birthdays, we found out that a friend of ours was having a baby. Yay!! I love it when people have babies. It’s (usually) so exciting! So I tried a new technique and hand dyed some organic bamboo terry with blueberries. I was so thrilled with the results that I am going to try some other natural dyes for more ‘Sleepy Worms’ to put in the shop.

I love our zucchini vine. The photos of the Sleepy Worm turned out so well, that I couldn’t resist finding out what other little creatures might alight on the huge fuzzy leaves. This little guy was made for a very dear friend of ours’ mother, H. H has taken me under her wing simply for my friendship with her daughter and my love of sewing. She is forever thinking of us and the girls and sending clothes from overseas, or fabric that she saw and thought I would love to add to my stash. I wanted to show H how much I appreciated her love and thoughts, but she is a phenomenal sewer, so anything I thought of making paled in comparison to what she can do. So I decided to make her something completely frivolous, but (if I do say so myself) incredibly cute!

As well as sewing for friends, we have been a bit crafty with the girls too. Our most recent project, which I saw somewhere while I was trawling blogs, was ‘gnome pegs’. Bel had a blast helping me paint them. I finished their faces and hats during nap time. Even though Bel is learning to sew using an elastic needle and rug base,

stitching tiny hats is still a bit beyond her!

We used non-toxic paints thinned with white vinegar (I read that this helps stain the wood. It seems to have worked). Once the paint was dry, we coated the pegs with bees wax and popped them in a low oven to let the wax melt over them to seal the paint even more and give them a nice shine.

The little pegs are much loved and the blue is much sucked on by Willow. They have joined the ever growing ranks in the doll house. Our next project will involve pom poms. We’ll see how much patience Bel really has when she realises how long it takes to make them!