Personalised Calendar 2012

I decided this year that I would make my Mum a calendar that features pictures of me and my brother and sister from when we were younger.

I started making the calendar in August and had it finished just in time for Christmas. I thought I would share with you some of my favourite pages. The picture above is from the front page and has an embossed flourish across the middle of the page, with embossed chipboard letters and some adhesive card numbers.

I tried to theme each page to the month as much as I could. Here is the January page with a lovely snowy picture from when we were young. I took some chipboard letters and glittered them by covering them with glue and sprinkling loose glitter over them. It kind of worked - some of the glitter fell off, but I am pleased with the result as it looks good on the January page.

My next favourite is the June page. Again, I glittered the chipboard letters with sea green glitter. To make the blue background, I brayered a royal blue ink, which gave it the watery look. The waves were cut out of some backing paper I had and the calendar tab was mounted onto a piece of blue core'dinations card with a light blue inside.

I love the picture on this one - my brother looks so excited for his first day at school. I used core'dinations card again for the background, in colours that were our school uniform - purple and green. I found some stickers with a school theme which I added which finish the page off perfectly.

And the December page which had to have a Christmas theme. The picture is of my Grandma's Christmas tree and I used a festive themed backing paper with some baubles. The bauble on the left was embossed with silver powder onto vellum and coloured on the back. The bauble on the right was embossed onto black card with white powder and painted with perfect pearls. The greeting in the middle was embossed with green glitter embossing powder.

Dragonfly Cross Stitch Needle Case

When I saw my sister last month and she had told me that she'd lost her only needle half way through stitching our Mum's birthday present, I knew exactly what I needed to make as her birthday present.

I had the pattern from a magazine cutting given to me and I changed the picture to this lovely oriental dragonfly. The colours in the dragonfly co-ordinated perfectly with some felt that I had bought a while back.

After I had stitched the design I had to work out how to put the rest of it together. I have to get it right in my head and picture it before I start constructing and this particular project took a while.

I had to cut a square of felt the same size as the cross stitch design and stitch the two together. Then the pattern told me that I had to stitch a backing piece of felt on to cover the design. I don't trust my stitching so I decided to stick it together with bondaweb. After I ironed it on the wrong side (!!) I worked out how it was going to go and managed to make it stay bonded together.

I then cut some contrasting coloured felt and trimmed the edges with the pinking shears. I sewed this through the case to create the leaves for the needles to be stored on.

I am very happy withe the result and would like to make some more now. My sister was pleased with it too. The only thing I should have added was a small fastener but I realised this too late and there was no way of adding it after I had bonded the middle layer together.