Our roots

This weekend I'm making a photo collage of mine and my husband's parents. I'm really excited to do it, because it's not photos of how they look now, instead it's photos of when they were in their early 20s. I thought it would be nice to celebrate the youth and enthusiasm in their faces; the idea came from looking at the photos with them and seeing the delight as they told stories about when and why the photos were taken.

There's my mum and dad in single photos, them both at their engagement party with my grandparents and one of my uncles and his wife, my husbands parents in single photos and together at a test shoot for their wedding pictures. There are only six pictures shown above, but I plan to add another photo of my dad, and one of Mum and Dad when they were expecting my elder sister. 

And here's the finished article! Very pleased!

Which part of your history would you capture in a collage? 

Butterfly wreath

I finally got around to making the butterfly wreath I got inspiration for on Pinterest (as you can see above).

Originally I wanted to do it with a French newspaper - something that looked good but wasn't 'readable' to most people. I ended up using craft paper after it turns out there are no foreign newspapers available in Lincoln or Newark.

To make it I used the following:

Craft paper
Ribbon
Old wire coat hanger
Silicone glue
Craft knife
Cutting mat
Butterfly stencils I found on the Internet
Jewellery wire
Rat-nose / fine pliers

I used the templates to cut out butterflies from the craft paper - fancy shapes for the plain paper, fancy paper for the plain shapes!

Then I twisted the jewellery wire into antenna, and glued these to the bodies. I wound ribbon around the coat hanger, which my husband shaped into a circle for me (it hurt my hands too much to do it). Then I stuck the butterflies onto the ribbon in a nice arrangement an waited overnight for them to dry. Done!

Blind toggles

I've just found this post sitting in my drafts since August 2012, so I thought I'd share it!

Some of the toggles on our Venetian blinds have been damaged over the years, a combination of trapping them in windows and a mischievous nibbling puppy, so I thought I'd replace them. Instead of going to a hardware store and getting boring plain wood ones to replace them with, I decided to go to a bead shop and get some big beads to personalise them, so this is the end result.