Summery Seaside RainBOW jars!!!

Hello GORGEOUS people!
I do hope you're having the most spendid week?
My weeks of to a good start, as I managed to fit a lovely couple of crafty and creative hours into my Monday afternoon. I had such a lovely time with my music playing, singing along to my favourite songs.
Not only was my creativness flowing, the wine was also!! Nothing better than a glass of RED when your playing happy hooking! :-)

I've been working on a mini project. Using some scraps of 'Creative Cotton', I've been making lots of tiny but bright crocheted rectangles.

Any ideas what these rectangle swatches are going to be???

BOWS!!!!

A few weeks ago a friend asked if I could make her a crocheted bow for her hair. I've been having a little play around with the idea and came up with this very simple design.

I made two different sizes of bow. Small and large, to match the different sized hair clips I bought from the supermarket.

I glued the bows to the hairclips and (of course) added cheery buttons to finish them off.

I think they're cute! They remind me of pasta bows :-)

They are also fun to decorate other little projects with, I think I'll be making a few more of these in the future!

Once I had finished my friends bows, I continued to play around with the 'Bow Theme'
I had some left over jam jars, so I though I'd give them a makeover.

I wrapped some old string around the jars and secured it with a little blob of glue. A very simple look! I added some cute flowers and rustic wooden buttons. OH MY!!!!!! What a transformation!!

I'm so very very happy with how they turned out!!!

Very simple, quick to make and totally inexpensive!

I wanted to add some 'Bow' decorations to the jars. Something similar to the felted hearts or crocheted pegs I had made before.

 

I had some cute little fan things (not sure what these are called?) that I wanted to incorporate.

It turns out I made little jam jars full of Summer Holidays!!  These little jars of joy remind me of vacations at the seaside! Probably something to do with the sand I used to prop the sticks up.

I think these jam jars are going to be with me for a long while! I'm totally in love with them! I love the thought of changing the theme of the sticks or simply using the jars for my crochet hooks or even just for flowers! So simple, but totally satisfying!!!

I hope you're all having a very crafty and creative week!!!

Matt xxx

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Love is..... Felt Hearts!

I remember it well. It was about a week ago when I logged in to Pinterest. I'm pretty new to the whole concept, and not following so many people yet, but there were some new pins posted by Lucy. One of them immediately stood out. There were so many colorful pictures on my screen, but somehow they all seemed black and white compared to this one. The pin linked to this wonderful tutorial! It's made by Revlie over at REVolution. I knew it right away... we had to make it!

Matt and I went to two different craft stores in town, to buy as many colors of felt that we could get our hands on. We were lucky that both stores sold different colors, so we were able to get a nice and varied palette of colorful happiness. Twenty-one beautiful sheets of felt.

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The pattern doesn't link to a heart shape, but we found one on the lovely blog of Francine Clouden.

Here's a link to the page with the heart on it. At the bottom there's a PDF link to a heart cut out. We made a print at 40% to get the size we wanted for our hearts. 

We both are not very experienced in sewing, so it was a little fiddly and fidgety to sew these tiny hearts together, but after a couple we got the hang of it. We didn't have a big range of colors for sewing so we popped over to the craft store again, and bought a beautiful range of Embroidery Floss colors. It's crazy how many colors they sell, it must have been about 150!

We spent about 3 days sewing every morning and every evening, until we were satisfied with the amount of hearts. They were so satisfying to make! We loved the moment when you get to stuff them, as they become thick, squishy and even cuter!

The craft store also had a great range of wooden sticks, and we ended up going for the 4mm ones. We sawed them in many different lengths to get a random and varied looking 'forest'.

Attaching the cute hearts to the sticks turned out really easy with the help of a glue gun. The pattern called for glue dots, but we've never seen those here in Germany, not even in our gigantic craft store. The glue gun worked just fine however! 

And than we needed some jars and bottles. Luckily we hadn't brought any of our glass to the recycling yet, so we had plenty to choose from. We chose from a selection of juice bottles, jam jars and German sausage jars (I love German sausages!). We washed out our favorites and than it came to the exciting moment of filling them with the hearts! What a disappointment! All the hearts turned backwards and nothing stayed in it's place. 

Let's read the pattern again... There it was, you had to glue the sticks into the jars so they would stay in place. But gluing?

Matt came up with the most wonderful idea. Sand in the jars! And not just normal sand, colored sand! So off we went, back to the craft store (they really sell everything!), and we bought 6 colors of sand to match our hearts.

 Look at these gorgeous rainbowy shades! Don't they make you happy?

The sand worked like a charm. It made it very easy to adjust and arrange the hearts as much as we wanted.

How gorgeous do they look all clumped together! It was so much fun to play with all the possibilities. We had 28 hearts to play with (we've used some colors twice) and it gave us a lot of options.

But sometimes, the simplest arrangements can be the prettiest. So we went for a rainbow! Here's a final picture of our "Love is... Felt Hearts" forest.

What a great time we had working together on this fabulous project! It's a quick and easy project, and the end results are so very rewarding!

Matt & Dennis xxx

This post has moved!
You can read an updated and revised version on our new blog.

Click here to read this post in full at it's new home!