Finished Fridays

I am catching up on my blog posts before I get too far behind so sorry this is late.

My Finished Friday for today is the blanket I had as a Work in Progress post a while ago here that I actually managed to finish. I put it on my list of things to do in my 2 weeks holiday from work so it had to be done otherwise the universe would end!

I stitched all the rows together and they actually looked really good- a few were a bit wonky here and there but on the whole it looked surprisingly good for a first attempt. In the pattern from Mollie Makes magazine they put bias binding around the edge and left the back as it was with all the seams from the squares. I didn't like that idea so on my trip to Ikea at the weekend I picked up a fleece for £1.59 in a pale blue perfect for the colours in my blanket.

When I got home I was very excited to get it finished and so pinned it all together straight away and got stuck into sewing around the edges. It was a bit tricky because the blanket was quite heavy and my sewing table isn't very long so it would slip off every now and again but the overall result is something I am very pleased with. Plus as it was a lovely sunny day I could take pictures of it in the garden!

I'm in love with it! I like the colours and the softness of the fleece on the back. Plus I like that I only had to pay £1.59 for it. They jumpers are old ones of mine and my mums that we found in the loft so cost me nothing. I am definitely going to try and upcycle some more. My brother has just thrown a load of old shirts my way so I can see a summer shirt material throw on the horizon! Plus lots of buttons for my button box!

Here is the blanket at home on the end of my bed. If I had a giant room with a reading chair in it would definitely be draped over that but until I'm a millionaire this will have to do!

I tried it out the other morning when I was a bit chilly doing some uni work. It is so soft and warm I didn't want to have to get dressed and put it down. I can't wait for winter again now so I can use it all the time.

See you next week

Xxx

Work In Progress Wednesday

Whoops I just realised that I didn't post a Work In Progress last wednesday! My excuse is that I had my first assignment to submit for a course I started in February with the Open University. It is the first one I've had to do since leaving university 3 and a half years ago so I was a bit nervous and rusty (plus I left it until the day before it was due in to write anything down!). I don't get the results back for a couple of weeks though so won't know if I did ok or not.

Anyway this weeks Work in Progress is a bit different. It is not a craft make as such more of a DIY exercise. I moved all the furniture in my room around about a year ago and have had a pile of picture frames, some of which used to be up on the wall others which have never made it up, under my chest of drawers ever since. Having had a few days off work now and the initial excitement of my holiday worn off I decided I'd better make use of it. I have always wanted to have a wall of pictures in my room and since moving everything around I've had a big empty space of wall which would be perfect but never actually done anything about it. So wanting to change that I took all my pictures downstairs to the lounge and lay them out on the rug which I measured to be roughly the size of the wall I wanted the pictures on. I enlisted the help of my dad as he used to be a graphic artist and generally has a very good eye for things like this, and we came up with a layout that worked.

Here is a picture of the layout on the lounge rug:

The big one in the middle was a present from my best friend for my 21st birthday and we thought it best and easiest to work around that to fit in the other pictures. After I had decided that this was going to be the layout for the picture wall I made up some templates of the pictures out of scrap paper and stuck them to the wall with blue tak so I could get an idea of how much it would fill the wall.

The next day we went to Milton Keynes to visit my brother which of course meant a visit to Ikea (it would be rude not to!) and obviously if your in Ikea you have to buy something and I brought some fabric (obviously) and a picture shelf. This is a genius idea- it is a narrow shelf that hold picture frames that you would have standing up and cluttering a surface. But with this shelf they all line up together and leave other surface free of clutter! I decided to buy the largest one and thought it could go along the bottom of my picture wall display and allow me to fit even more frames and pictures out.

I had to juggle around the original plan a bit to fit it in but I managed and think it looks great. I put some of the picture hooks in myself, dad did the top one as the nail kept bending but it turned out it was because it was going into brick instead of the breeze blocks further down, so not my fault! Dad showed me how to measure where the hooks should go so they would sit in the right place and how to mark where the holes needded drilling for the shelf. I was too scared of messing up to actually drill the holes with the scary drill but I put the raw plugs and screw in and here is my picture wall now:

The 3 green frames are going along the top but I'm having them as a birthday present so can't put them up yet. I just need to decide which pictures to have in them all now!

Hope you have a good rest of the week and the sunny weather we're having here continues!

Xxx