cleaning vs craft...

I have so much respect for those bloggers who manage to post on a daily basis, or even every couple of days. Me; life gets hectic and somehow I just never made it to the computer this week. Our house is just about ready to go on the market and this week brought the guy to do our HIP, (home info pack) and the estate agent to do the photo, cue lots of tidying and scrubbing and hence not much time on the computer!

However I did manage to steal some crafty moments this week, just to offset all the cleaning I was doing! I made this small postcard collage...


Then during the cleaning, I found two glass frames with nothing in them, so decided to have a play. I printing words onto paper. Cut them out with my craft knife. Ripped some pages out of magazines which was very satisfying, (even though at this point I was creating more mess to tidy!) and put the pages behind the cut out stencil.

And voila! It only took about 20 minutes and was a useful distraction when I should have been dusting or whatnot!

This one went in the bathroom in case you couln't guess!

I also had in mind to do some sewing this week and decide I would brave the initiation of making something with a zip. For some reason this has seemed like a scary prospect and looked too complicated, time consuming etc etc but again it's amazing how the concept of doing something I needed to do - ie tidying the house vs playing around, won over my fear. I had these doodles in my sketch book and decided to do something very loosely based on them.

I kept this very simple because I still wasn't sure about the zip idea, so started small and decided to make a pouch which I could use as a little make up bag.

A little freezer stenciling and then with the help of this tutorial I actually managed to put in a zip - yay! and it really wasn't as bad as I thought.



I added a little bit of embroidery which was only possible because I hadn't sewn the lining up at the bottom and ordinarily I would have done this before I sewed the pouch, (as it really is so much easier than leaving it until the last minute and trying to sew through a 3 inch hole!) but I was so unsure about the zip thing that I didn't want to waste time doing the embroidery if my pouch was a disaster!

I was so pleased with myself that I didn't even stop to iron my pouch before I took a photo!
So now I have zip love and will be heading off to buy myself a bunch of zips so I can make pouches to my hearts content...