Well hello to you. For the first time in ages, I'm here with something crafty rather than beauty related.

For Christmas my lovely Mum gave me a 3 month subscription to Crafty Creatives. Crafty Creatives operate a monthly box service not dissimilar to the beauty box subscriptions. Except, of course, that rather than beauty samples they send you some lovely crafty bits to get your creative juices flowing.  My first box arrived yesterday!

I love crafting in all different guises. As I said the other week, it has taken a bit of a back seat in my life over the last 6 months or so, due to work being so very hectic. So these are a few bits I did a very long time ago that I've never blogged about.

I never did post a picture of the final pair of curtains I made for this house, which I've lived in for over a year now. They shouldn't be the final pair, I have £65 worth of fabric to make some for the front room, but the curtain pole in there is flimsy and would fall down under the weight of a decent pair of lined curtains. We bought a heavyweight curtain track to put up, but the wall above the window is, scarily enough, hollow. How did we find this out? We drilled holes into it. Gah. We're too scared to replace the pole with another pole, or add a centre bracket for stability, because its drilled into the UPVC window frame and the plastic might crack. Its all a bit devastating really, the front room would look miles better with decent, lined curtains.

Anyway. The curtains I never blogged about are the ones in our second bedroom, which is actually a home office cum dressing room! These curtains are my favourites by a mile. They were done in no time at all, they have less flaws in them, and despite not being my first fabric choice are really nice and really made that room look ten times better (when we moved in there wasn't even a curtain pole up...but it's a bedroom?! Huh?!



Not the best picture, I always seem to take them in poor light. The fabric is from Ikea and was about £6 a metre. It wasn't my first choice of fabric but was better quality than the fabric I had wanted and actually, I really like it, it fits in very well!

I overdid the amount of fabric I needed so I had rather a lot left over. So I made doorstops for the dining room and the second bedroom. We have a bookcase behind the door between the dining room and the kitchen and everytime the door knocked it, it wobbled. I had visions of our bookcase toppling over and everything being destroyed, so a doorstop was essential here. The door into the second bedroom had a tendancy to hit my OH's desk, so I decided a doorstop would be good in there to prevent his desk and monitor getting battered all the time. I used the same trusty book as I used for the dog print cushions. I struggled with how to weight them down. I didn't really want to use rice and whilst I was happy to use sand, getting sand was proving hard as I don't drive and its hard to buy in small quantities. Then I went to Ikea and found bags of sand used for...I don't even know actually. Putting in vases to look cool? Anyway. It was an ideal weight, came in a thick strong bag, was a perfect size and was cheap to boot. Hooray!
This was everything cut out and ready to go, along with an essential cup of coffee which is always necessary for me when undertaking any task!


And this was how they ended up!



There was a bit of a gap in them being started and finished as I ran out of wadding and had to buy more! Obviously, the fabric of these co-ordinates with the curtains. Pretty simple to make, I'd definitely make them again if I had a need to!

Next on my list, which in fairness has been on my to-do list for the year we've lived here, is to make a draught excluded for the living room door. We have a teeny tiny vestibule so that the front door doesn't open directly into our living room, but the front door is old and gappy and despite there being a step up into our front room it does get draughty. I have the fabric, I have what I'm going to stuff it with. I just haven't made it yet. Whoopsies.