A nice easy one to ease me slowly back into the tutorials! Continuing our Halloween crafts, I give you a pair of less than frightening monsters, some may even dare to call them cute! They’re entirely hand sewn and the fun fur is very forgiving, so they make a great project for beginners or for the young sewer. Make them in a variety of colours and spread them around the house for some fluffy Halloween decorations, put a bell or [...]

I just sat down to get started on taking the pictures on today’s “Tuesday Tutorial” and then realised that pattern pieces and designs are currently sitting in my husband’s laptop bag, that is currently sitting in an office in North Sydney. Oops. I guess that’s what I get for scribbling down my ideas the moment inspiration strikes… and writing them on the back of his meeting notes! In my defence, I promise they did just look like scraps of paper. [...]

My first (of hopefully many, but we’ll see!) free needlework pattern is up and ready to be put on anything you fancy! Pictured is my version of the twirly birdy, I wanted to add more colour to the outline so double threaded some pink in with black, and I must say it looks pretty good. I also chain stitched the legs to add a bit more bulk. It wasn’t placed onto anything special, just a piece of cotton, but I [...]

That’s notebook as in one of those old skool ones, with paper and lines and stuff, as opposed to the laptop type, does anyone remember them? I churn through notebooks at a furious pace, I have lists constantly on the go and a different notebook for every topic. I drool over the beautiful ones you see in the stationary stores but always hold myself back, notebooks are for me to scribble in, I know I would feel guilty defacing a [...]

I love the thought of surrounding myself in handmade items, preferably that I’ve made myself, and to me nothing seems better than sleeping underneath something that I’ve spent months creating, which is what turned me on to quilting about a year ago. Unfortunately I didn’t think this plan through very well, I’m not a very precise crafter, and I’m certainly not a patient one, something that I think is required for quilters. So quilt top after quilt top was shoved [...]

Ed’s note: Please welcome Vanessa to Craftblog, our jewellery and lampwork expert! She creates some of the most beautiful beads I have ever seen and will hopefully be sharing many more of her tips and tricks in future posts. Did you know that Australia produces 97% of the world’s opal? When we think of opals, we usually associate them with sparkling little gems with colours coming in from different directions of light. Naturally, it came to my surprise when I [...]

Crochet on tea towels is (in my opinion) a very Aussie tradition, my mum thinks it’s hilarious that I’ve resorted to crocheting on tea towels and insists that this alone should be enough for Mr Rudd to grant me citizenship. I’m not quite convinced on this one, but I do love that something so simple can make an otherwise cheapy pair of teatowels look so much cuter. If you’re experienced at crochet this is a very quick project to throw [...]

Every week Arounna Khounnoraj posts a craft walkthrough on Bloesem Kids, they’re generally very kid focused and excellent for introducing different mediums to younger children. My son isn’t quite at a level to be able to do this yet, so this was entirely done by myself – I think I need to get my niece and nephew round for a day of art so I can thoroughly test all of the child related tuts that I have on my “to [...]

Ahh, more adventures in felting/fulling on CraftBlog! Previously I wrote about how to hand felt your projects, now I’ll speak about the far less manual version of just chucking it in the washing machine aka “time to ignore everything the laundry label tells you to do”! Machine felting works great for larger pieces, you lose the control that you have with hand felting, but it also allows you to sit down and have a cup of tea whilst your washing [...]

This is a great quickie project to gift to a sewer or needlecraft junkie! It takes hardly any time to throw together (the main time waster is waiting for the glue to dry!) and you can customise it to your hearts desire with cool fabrics, ric rac, buttons etc. I love how they look like little cupcake pincushions. You Need: Something tubular – for the small one I used a toilet roll, for the larger ones I used the tube [...]