Birth Announcements

To date, I've crafted paper birth announcements for the friends and family of three babies and two cross stitches for the babies themselves. The first announcement was made in honour of my eldest, in February 2008. I made long, horizontal postcard style announcements with her picture and basic details on the front, with more detail on the back and a magnetic strip so it could be stuck onto people's fridges:

 

  

I made the mistake of using rub on alphabet transfers for the lettering on the front of the announcements. It took forever! Mega pain in the butt! I vowed never to use them again, and five years later I can say I've kept my promise ;)

The second birth announcement I made was for Saree's second daughter, whom I had the honour of being doula for. I stuck with a similar design: long, horizontal announcement with magnetic strip on the back for easy display on the fridge. But this time I put all the details on the front, with the photo. This time I used a word processor to create the lettering myself, printed it off and cut them up into little squares which I stuck on card and then on foam squares so they popped up from the page and made her name stand out from the rest of the text:

My third set of paper birth announcements were in honour of my second daughter's birth. This time I decided to create a vertical standing card featuring a photo and her name on the front and her details and more images inside the card. I cut out two little flowers per card, stuck a tiny pearl sticker in the centre of one and stuck that flower on top of the other, then placed them in the corner of the photo, using a foam square for the pop-up. They also feature a small strip of ribbon:

 

I got a little addicted to cutting our flowers and ended up having extras, which I stuck inside cards to use up.

I will have to do this all again in the next few months, as we welcome baby 3 into our family sometime in July. I haven't even begun to think about the announcements, but as in the past: I'll get started before the baby is born so I only have to stick the details on at the last minute before posting :) My nesting manifests in birth announcement preparation. 

I have also made a cross stitch birth announcement for my second born and Saree's daughter Eloise (and will do it for my other kids too, I just haven't got around to it yet). I made the following for Eloise's 2nd birthday:

 

Unformately I don't have any pictures of it once it was framed, it looks very sweet in it's warm wooden frame. The strawberries are of special significance to our relationship, which still gives me the warm and fuzzies to think of. Here she is recieving it: 

For my second born's cross stitch announcement I only did text. I used an alphabet that remains my favourite. Part of the reason I'm finding it hard to get started on a cross stitch birth announcement for my eldest daughter is that I haven't found a unique font I love as much as the one I used below:

Photos just don't do this alphabet justice! You'll have to pop 'round some time to check it out in the aida ;)

And thus concludes my birth announcement craft.

Personalised Cross Stitch

For her 30th birthday, I decided to make our eldest daughter's godmother a personalised cross stitch. I sent her a message to find out her favourite colours and she was intrigued, but I managed to keep it secret (miracle!) until it was finished and ready to give. I put together a couple of different patterns (from my big book of cross stitch patterns by Reader's Digest), tweaked them for improvement/personalisation et voila:

Juls declared it "the best present ever!" and teared up #missionaccoplished :D

Yay, caught the moment!

I knew she'd love it, it was such a joy to stitch, knowing how touched she'd be. When I finished it I didn't know what to do with my hands. I felt a little lost, having spent every spare second on this.

Watching me get my stitch on, inspired the birthday woman's Goddaughter too :D

Portlandia Cross Stitch

One of my favourite women in the world shares my birthday (well, I share hers, she claimed it about six years before me). Last year I cross stitched her some Portlandia inspired craft for her birthday gift, using patterns from subversive cross stitch:

They took a few months and I learned some important cross stitch lessons. First, 3 strands of floss is ideal, while 4 gives a great full look, it's too thick and gets tangled and requires re-threading far too frequently. The other important lesson was NEVER try to work with the prettiest, sparkly DMC floss *death to sparkly floss!*

While working on these I also learned about needle threaders *happy magic music* I don't know how it could be that as I enter my third year of cross stitching I'm only learning about the threader now (in fact, I didn't know what it was in sewing kits and used to throw them out!). Life changed. 

Went with 2 red and 2 yellow strands of floss for the bird

Completely changed the colours to ones I/Laura would like, including mutli coloured floss to give the contents of the jar that little bit more authentic pickled look. The border in the pattern is grander but I made it sparkly and blue and could not hack one single stitch more in that vile fraying floss.

For readers who don't get just how awesome I am ;)I give you the two clips from Portlandia oft quoted in our homes, which the above cross stitches reference:

And the most appropriate Portlandia clip for a blog about craft LOLZ:

Nintendo Themed 30th

In August last year, I found an awesome cross stitch pattern which I decided to make for Huz for his 30th birthday present. It was tricky trying to create this gift because whenever I sat down to craft, he would be nearby, wanting to chat, catching glimpses of what I was working on. Luckily I'm a master of deception ;) and he got a great surprise. 

Note his geekarific tee! The rules of rock, paper, scissors, lizard spock.

I also found a really sweet cross stitch pattern which I knew would be simple and quick to create. It took me less than two days. I made it to go in the centre spot in a multiple picture frame and had a blast getting prints of our family snaps and arranging our favourites (with our eldest's help) to give to him for his second birthday present:

Initially, I had some trouble figuring out what to make him for his birthday cake, my friend Meg had the brilliant idea of sticking with the Nintendo theme of his cross stitch gift. I googled for Nintendo cake ideas and settled on a very awesome, albeit time consuming, though not technically difficult 80s Super Mario cake design: 

Cute as a fox (the blog I saw this design on) created a template to work from, complete with a list of how many of each colour cupcake would be required to pull it off. There are 42 flesh coloured, 37 red, 31 blue, 24 brown (though my food dye ended up drying very dark and was hard to distinquish from the black), 7 black and 2 yellow: 143 in total.

A little tip should you ever want to recreate a realistic flesh colour icing, I do it by using one or two drops of "rose" coloured food dye, a drop of yellow food dye and a sprinkle of cocoa powder.

It took 12 hours (with breaks for eating) to make the cupcakes, make the icings, ice and arrange them. I had originally planned to have a cake board made for the design to take the cake to the park for lunch (it would have required a board 75x95cms. But I wisely decided to use the kitchen table as my cake board and ask those who wanted cake to join us for cake at home after lunch. To give you a sense of the cake's scale:

Originally I was going to make my usual batch of butter cream icing, dye it, slather it on each cupcake and then smooth over with a spatula and warm water. But after testing that out earlier in the week, I realised this was going to take waaaay too long. Instead, I made my icing runny, so that I could dip the cupcakes in their colour and rotate the cupcake in my hands to make sure the entire top was covered. Then as it set, it hardened, looking smooth without any extra work on my part.

Might I add that I chose to do this with mini-cupcakes rather than regular size. You can bake 24 cupcakes at a time using a mini-cupcake tray, which was my motivation, but in the end I was really glad I didn't try to pull it off with regular sized cupcakes: I doubt they would have fit on my kitchen table!

I was pleased with how Mario turned out, most importantly Huz loved it. When I finished around 1am the morning of his birthday, before going to bed I told Huz I was finished and he was welcome to come have a look. It was very cool watching him walk in and his brain take a minute to process what he was looking at, then BANG, he recognised the image and was laughing.