She arrived last week, late on Wednesday night, as we were driving home on the Friday for a wedding. Luckily, I had pretty much finished her present, just needed to add the finishing touches.
I've been working on this, on and off, since April, and this was the first crafty project I've really attempted since I was a Guide. I knew I wanted to make baby (the flavour was a suprise!) a present, but I wasn't sure what I was capable of. My lovely friend Charlie suggested English Paper Piecing, I remembered my Ebay password and off I went.
Admittedly, my first effort was less than commendable - my lovely MIL now has a bookmark and mat for her dressing table which she kindly pretended to like!
Attempt no. 2 went much better thankfully. I found various gender-neutral fabrics on Ebay as well as paper templates, and bought a cream cushion and new duck-down cushion pad from Dunelm. I decided to decorate with two small "flowers" on the front of the cushion, and one larger one on the back. There are some great tutorials to explain how to make these, particularly here and on Sew Mama Sew too.
Once I finished my little "flowers", I lightly stitched them onto the empty cushion cover. I'm making two of these, so stopped at this point and repeated for the second cushion (this took much, much longer to do than it did to type!). I also ironed them a LOT which is not my favourite of jobs by a long stretch, as you can tell from the creases.
This was where I was up to when we got the call on Wednesday night to say that baby was here!
I then had a mad rush to finish before we went up early on Friday morning, especially as my felt (again from the Felt Fairy on Ebay, excellent quality again) didn't arrive until Thursday morning as she arrived a little earlier than expected. I printed out her name in Copper at about size 200, then Hubby had the nice job of cutting out the letters (which he found was much easier to do using scissors - after he had found his craft knife -oops)
Hubby practicing his Beaver Leader craft skills - look at that concentration!
Next step was to stitch the letters on! I chose quite bright colours with a fair bit of pink and purple. The letters were all stitched on with yellow thread except the middle "a" which is pink.
The finished article, front and back!
Now I just need to decide what to do on the next one to make it a little different - we should have a bit more time between birth and visit next time so I might ask a friend with an embroidery machine to do something with the date of birth/weight.
Unfortunately we couldn't go and see the little poppet, so her present has been left with the proudest Grandma in the world! Hope she likes it.......
