Christmas Clothespeg Elf

A while back I bought some clothespegs - you know the dolly style ones - with the intention of making something with them.  Anyway, they have been sat in a drawer doing nothing so yesterday I decided to make a Chrilstmas Elf using one of them.

I had a look through Pinterest and came across a lovely little fellow by Tara Dennis.  She has a great downloadable pdf instruction sheet along with the templates you need to make the elf.  You can find the details here.

As I am not a big fan of gluing fabric together, I stitched mine instead.  I cut my pieces smaller than the template and did an over stitch on the outside whilst placed on the peg.  For the trousers, I cut the pattern in half and slotted each piece through the gap and again stiched them and then moved the felt around so that the stitched parts were between the slot where you couldn't see it.  I made the gloves smaller as well and I did glue those into place.  For the songsheet, I cut out a small piece of musical notes paper and glued it to some card and then glued the gloves to that.

Here is my finished elf

I am really pleased with my elf, he is rather cute I think!  My niece has now decided she would like to make some so she will be coming over this afternoon!

Thanks for popping by!!

Felt Pencil Toppers

The weather is starting to turn although here in the UK, I think we have been quite lucky this year as we had a nice September and although we are having rain and a few storms now, we are also getting sunshine in between.  It is getting quite chilly in the evenings though and alot of people have already started to turn their heating on!

I am in Christmas mode but not that motivated so having to push myself to make things for the Christmas Market I am co-organising.

I've been making these cute little felt pencil toppers.  They don't take too long and are ideal kids to buy at the market or for stocking fillers.  Anyway I've made a batch of them and will make some more as I am hoping they will sell well!

Here are the ones I have made already

I especially like the monster ones as the colours are bright and anything goes!!

I've also been making a start on tree decorations.  I wanted to do some felt snowflakes this year and found the perfect die by Sizzix except that is is discontinued and no one seems to want to part with it!  I can't believe that there isn't an unwanted one out there!  The die is a Sizzix snowflake die 657055 and I believe it was a Basic Grey Bigz die and it looks like this

If anyone in the UK has this and wants to sell it, please let me know!!  You can email me bumblebeescraftden@gmail.com or if you see it on a craft selling group on Facebook, I'd also love to hear about it!  Thanks!

Ok, that's all for now!

Fantastic New Sizzix French Bow Cutting Die

I love bows and think they alway give a more finished look to gift wrapping especially my gift wrapping which is not the greatest!!  Some people love to gift wrap and I remember seeing in a tv show called Orphan Black that one of the characters had a gift wrapping room with things on the wall to hold her rolls of gift wrap and a big table in the midde to do the wrapping!  As much as I love the idea of making your gifts look nice, mine never look great and if I am wrapping a whole batch of gifts they gradually get worse and worse!!  But that is about to change, thanks to a new cutting die that Sizzix have just released.  It is called 'French Bow' and is designed by Brenda Walton for Sizzix.  It makes lovely, large bows - the largest bow part is 10.5cm x 5.5cm (4 inches x 2 1/4 inches).  It's a standard Bigz dies so you don't need to use extended cutting pads.

The large size of this bow is achieved by folding over your cardstock/paper, you then position your fold on the die so that it is joined on the fold when it's cut.  Here's the cutting surface so you can see what I mean!

There is a large bow and a smaller one and the ribbon tails which you can either cut with a single piece of cardstock or again fold over and cut depending on how you want your bow look.  There is also the middle piece which had fold lines marked on it for you.

Here is the assembled bow

I used this die to make a bow to jazz up a gift bag.  The bag was one I recycled so just needed abit of decoration to make it prettier!  I made a matching tag using my new Stampin Up angled top tag punch (a very nifty and useful gadget!!)

I bought this at a craft show last week but I think it is being released this month so should be available in most craft stores.

Sorry the pics aren't great but the light today is weird :)