My gobsmackingly awesome niece is due to turn eighteen next month and I’ve been wondering what to gift her for a while. I know I wanted to make her something, but I was unsure exactly what I could do. My boys were sitting down watching Sleeping Beauty, I was half listening as the fairy godmothers were blessing Aurora when it suddenly clicked, my niece needs to begin her adult life with a Fairy Godmother, and that’s exactly what I made [...]

One of my favourite things from Connor’s hungry caterpillar birthday celebration was the little matching party hats I made up for him and his brother, let me refresh your memory with a very bored looking birthday boy… (Connor is 3 going on 13, he has already decided he is far too cool to have people sing “Happy Birthday” to him) The hats are great if you’re fed up of buying party hats that rarely last the day or to add [...]

If you want everyone to get a little bit of handmade from you for Christmas, but don’t have the time to make up 30 different gifts, this is a great way to send a little bit of homemade festive cheer to everyone. They’re very quick and simple to make up, and look like they too far longer than they actually did, exactly what you need when you’ve got a list of handmade gifts about a mile long to make up! [...]

Okay, so it’s not Tuesday, I’m two days late on the blog love post, and I haven’t put up Flickr Friday, but damnit, I don’t care because I’m so excited about this tut – which is why it’s going up early. Hot Christmases like we have in Australia are still a very strange concept to me, growing up Christmas was about snow (or grey British drizzle!), log fires and roast dinners, then five years ago I suddenly had to adjust [...]

My eldest son has just made the move from his high chair and onto a booster seat at “the big table”, yay for creating more space by putting the high chair in the garage (at least for a few more months until his younger brother needs it!), less of a yay for my dining table constantly being under a barrage of crumbs, melted cheese and sticky pesto. So, as with most tutorials on here, out of necessity I made up [...]

One last minute Halloween tutorial before October is over! This time something sweet for parties, or if you just want to make something to celebrate at home, or they’re perfect for creepy birthday parties, super simple and very effective, I give you spider cupcakes! . You will need Cupcakes – There are a million and one cupcake/sponge recipes online, so I’m going to assume everyone’s google-fu is up to scratch on this one My basic one is 1 egg=50g of [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]