Make it on a Monday: Felt Box

This is the first edition of Make it on a Monday, I hope you like it!

I have a love of felt - you can make loads of things with it, its easy to work with, cheap (although 100% wool felt can be expensive) and you can get it in a million different colours. I was reading Simply Homemade, a new craft magazine and fell in love with a felt and fabric sewing box. As I don't need a sewing box and didn't want to use any fabric (I have a limited selection) I decided to make a small felt trinket box.

I haven't actually made the "proper" box yet, but I made a trail run one out of some scraps of felt, I didn't want to go using the new felt I bought if I ended up not being able to make the box properly or I wasn't happy with it. Thankfully, I'm very happy with it and cant wait to make the "proper" one! The below picture is the felt I will be using to make the box, plus ric rac, ribbon and buttons I will be using to decorating it. The felt and ric rac was ordered from Paper-and-String, I cant tell you how pleased I was with my order and the service!

So, onto making it!

You will need:

12 5inch squares of felt (or whatever size you wish, keeping it square makes it easier)
8 4inch by 1.5 inch strips of felt
12 5inch squares of stiff cardboard (you will need to trim them to fit)
Thread
Needle
Decorations (if you want)

Firstly, sew on any decorations to the panels that you want to add. Then sew together two panels along three sides, continue with the rest of the panels until you end up with 6 panels, each with three sides sewn up. I used blanket stitch on mine but you can use whatever stitch you prefer. Slide in the cardboard into each panel and sew the opening closed. Sew the smaller strips in the same way, without adding the cardboard, these will form the lip of the lid.

Now, starting with the base, sew the panel edges together to create a topless box. Again, I used blanket stitch but you can use whatever stitch you prefer. Do the same with the lid, sewing the strips along the edges of the lid.

You should, if I've written at least marginally useful instructions, end up with something like this -

Make it on a Monday

I have a love for crafts - I sew, knit, make jewellery and cross-stitch to name a few things - and I thought I would make a feature out of my craft blog posts by having a "Make it on Monday" regular feature. Each Monday (where possible) I will be posting photographs, tutorials, updates and links regarding all different crafts. I may have a give away every so often as well!

If you have a love for crafts, no matter what it is or how good you are at it, why dont you get involved in "Make it on a Monday"? If you want to get involved, you can place the button below (code provided) on your blog and get posting about your crafty adventures every monday!

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Recipe Share! Spaghetti Bolognaise

Spaghetti bolognaise is one of the first dishes that I ever cooked and in my opinion, its one of the simplest. Or at least it can be - some recipes call for all sorts of ingredients but as I prefer simple cooking, I've always kept this dish really simple. Although this is a meaty recipe, you can easily change the beef to quarn and remove the stock cubes to make it a veggie one, I often do this when my mum comes to stay as she's a veggie.

I thought as a bit of a change I'd type the recipe on a chalkboard, looks quite good I reckon!

Domestic Goddess Fail

Firstly I'd like to apologise for not posting this last week or so - my mum was staying so as you can imagine, I was exceptionally busy!

I'm really glad that my mum came as I'd gotten myself in a bit of a pickle. The photograph on the left is  my ironing pile. I may have "forgotten" about my ironing for a couple of weeks. Or three weeks. I'm not really sure as I'd been avoiding the spare bedroom (where the ironing was) and I'd been grabbing clothes straight out of the tumble dryer. Awful aren't I? Definitely a "Domestic Goddess" fail moment!

I'd managed to get the flat looking reasonably good with the help of my other half before my mum came but there was still that pesky pile of ironing that needed doing. I was a terrible daughter though - I fluttered my eyelashes at my mother and she rolled up her sleeves and set up the ironing board. Couple of hours later it was all done. Goodness knows what I would do without her... Thanks mum!

My wonderful mum also helped me do some sorting out. Both me and her love crafty things, from sewing to cross stitching to knitting to scrap booking so as you can imagine, both of us have rather large "stashes". Mine was in a storage box that just wasn't big enough and it was impossible to find anything without emptying it out and sifting through it.

So... We went shopping for baskets or small storage boxes, went to B&Q once but it was going to cost £20+ to get the amount I wanted! No way I was paying that so we nipped into Tesco and they had some white plastic baskets that were really cheap and perfect for what I wanted. The photograph above shows my new baskets, each one having different things in them and oh my its made it so much easier to find what I want! I want a piece of ribbon? I go to the ribbon box. I want to do some cross-stitch? I get the cross stitching basket out. I'm a very happy bunny! I do have my fabric, sewing machine and jewellery making bag in another cupboard (to the left of the one in the picture) but I can now access those really easily too. I'm looking forward to getting crafty now!

I'm also going on a mini diet. I need to loose some weight and generally become healthier so I've decided to cut out/down on a few things including biscuits, cheese, bread, butter and cream. I haven't had a biscuit in four days which is good seeing as I was eating a packet of biscuits a day. I'm hoping that cutting down on the fatty/sugary stuff and being more active I will be able to slowly cut down my weight. I'm not interested in loosing loads of weight in a short space of time as to me its not healthy and it usually doesn't last - you just put the weight back on. Wish me luck for my new diet, I could do with as much encouragement as I can get!

Well that's a mini update on me, I have some plans for posts this week including ones on incenses mixes, altars and my personal Book of Shadows. I will also be getting involved in the Witchy Wisdom Post-It Note Tuesdays (click on the logo in the sidebar for more info).

Hope you are all having a wonderful week!