Vintage Style Greetings Cards

Hello friend!

I hope you had a great weekend. Mine was pretty busy since it was my Dad's birthday, but we had such a lovely time. It was great to spend time with my family, it was one of the best weekends I've had for ages.

This photo is the birthday card I gave my Dad. I wanted to share this little idea for making your own greetings cards from postcards. It isn't really a tutorial, just a suggestion. I had a lot of vintage postcards left over after our wedding (I'll have to tell you more about that some time!). I really wanted to use them, but lots of them were already written. I simply bought some card blanks and these lovely old fashioned self-adhesive photo corners (which I got from Paperchase) so that I could turn the postcards into greetings cards. I love the fact that you can still remove the postcard and read the message on the back, and the person who receives the card can even reuse the postcard.

I used these vintage postcards, which I bought quite cheaply on Ebay, since I already had them, but there is no reason why you couldn't use new postcards as well, or your own photos. I just love the poems and mottos you get on old postcards, like this one, with its wish that your birthday is "right royal"!

This is such an easy way to make unique handmade cards, give it a go!

My Wonderful Wedding Quilt

There were so many things I loved about my wedding day but none more than the amazing wedding quilt that my wonderful friends and family. This was a secret project that I knew nothing about until we were presented with the quilt after cutting our wedding cake. I wanted to share it with you partly just because it is so incredible - this is definitely one of those "things you would save in a fire" items - but also because I thought it might inspire others of you to do a similar project for someone you love. It is a great wedding gift, but could also work for a new baby gift, a birthday gift for a landmark birthday, or an anniversary present. We worked together to make another quilt last year for my little sister's wedding, so I came to learn more about the work involved from the other side of the project last summer!

The wedding quilt project was masterminded by Martha, one of my oldest and best friends in the world. Together with my sisters and both of our mums, they emailed all my girlfriends, female relatives and future in-laws and asked who would like to be involved. Everyone who wanted to contribute was given a basic format to follow, which ensures there is some consistency in the overall design. They were told a set size for the square pieces, given this pattern of light, medium and dark fabrics to follow and asked to add a personal design in the centre. The good thing is that each individual square is small and light enough to be easy to post, so people who live far away or even overseas, can take part if they want.

The centre designs of each square are so personal to us, and reference things from the history of my relationships with the person who made each square: my friend Sarah put tea and cake on her square as a reminder of the many times we have been for afternoon tea together, while my Mum embroidered the lyrics to one of the songs she sang to me and my sisters when we were little ("You are my honey, honeysuckle/ I am the bee"). My mother-in-law and sister-in-law featured a beautiful cross stitch design from one of the seed packets sold by their family company - fittingly, Hearts' Ease - while my sister's friend did a fantastic square featuring the binary solo from Flight of the Conchords song "The Humans Are Dead". Each one was completely different and totally personal to us.

Once all the individual squares were collected, they had to be assembled into a quilt top. A single fabric was used in between all the squares, which again brings together the different designs. You then have to add backing, edging and sandwich a layer of padding in between. All these pieces are sandwiched together and tacked together to hold all the layers of the sandwich together. The edging and piecing together is done with a sewing machine, but then all the quilting was done by hand. You can do as much or as little hand quilting as you can bear, or you can do it by machine if you are confident with a sewing machine, but bear in mind that the quilt will be enormous (ours in the size of our king size bad) and heavy, so it will potentially be hard to manipulate when using a sewing machine.

One of the most wonderful things about this quilt to me is the many hours of work that went into making it. The time, thought and effort it obviously took to make this precious heirloom are what give it its value to me. It is incredibly moving to look at it and think of the love that went into it. We have it on our bed every day so I see it all the time and it is part of the fabric of our every day lives. I love the idea that one day I will hand it down the family, along with the stories behind each square.

Having worked on another wedding quilt myself, I can say that it is also a really fulfilling thing to do for someone special, and there are such happy times to be had sitting with a group of other women (or men) of several generations, friends and family, all working on hand stitching a quilt like this. It feels solid and old fashioned and symbolic to work on something like this, knowing how much meaning it will carry. We will treasure our wedding quilt forever.

Have you worked on a collaborative wedding project before? What did you make? And what special wedding gifts have you been given?


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Monday Make: Dry Wipe Boards Two Ways

Hi there,

I hope you had a great weekend. I did lots of planning and organising for developing this blog, though I don't want to give away all my plans just yet!

Today I have finally got round to a project I have been wanting to do for ages. I saw this idea to use frames to make dry wipe boards for your home on Pinterest last year. I don't know who originally came up with this idea, and I don't claim it as my own. It was one of those ideas that seems so obvious once you see it, it makes you wonder how you didn't come up with it yourself.

Basically, the principle is that the glass (or perspex) of the frame is a wipe clean surface that you can write on with a white board marker. You can then customise this with any kind of paper, photographs or fabric you can think of. Easy! I have made two frames for my home today, which took about half an hour for both. It is cheap, easy and totally customisible - what's not to love? I went for two contrasting looks, just to show how versatile this project is. 

The first one I made using a beautiful piece of fancy edged vintage linen that I bought in a bundle with a load of doileys, hankies and other treasures from a charity shop down in Somerset. I picked this one because it happened to fit my frame (a cheap one from Wilkinson) perfectly, which I took as a sign! I like that with this one the fabric isn't pressed completely flat so you can still see the texture and creases and I love the gentle, neutral colour palette and simplicity of the design. This would work well with all kinds of textiles from bright prints to lace to those lovely vintage hand embroidered hankies and napkins you often find in charity shops.

The second one I made used another cheap frame, this one from Ikea, and used a piece of Orla Kiely wrapping paper I got from John Lewis today. In fact, I think the paper probably cost more than the frame! I simply cut the paper to size and put it in the frame, done! This is a much more modern, graphic style, and I think it looks really great, and much more expensive than it actually was. I think in total both these dry wipe boards cost me less than £10.

I am thrilled with how this project has come out, both boards look great in my home and will be really useful as well as beautiful. Most people probably have a frame and a bit of nice wrapping paper, leftover wallpaper or fabric at home already, so this is the kind of quick project that you could easily accomplish in an evening. The great thing is that you can change them as often as you like and customise them to match or contrast with any colour scheme. These would be a great homemade gift since they work for meal planners, shopping lists, to do lists or just leaving your sweetheart little notes before you go out... Enjoy making your own customised dry wipe board at home and combining home organisation with prettiness!

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Monday Make: Magnetic mustard!

Hi, did you have a great weekend? I hope so. Ours was good but mega-busy, my in-laws were up for a seed sale at Waddesdon Manor (my father-in-law has his own business as a heritage seed merchant, and Mr Cardigan works for the family company too. If you or someone you know is a gardener then check them out online and on Twitter). The weather was terrible on Saturday but beautiful on Sunday, ideal for getting outside and walking with the buggy in the lovely grounds of Waddesdon.

I wanted to share with you this quick little make that I did over the weekend. I love some of the classic designs that are still used in food packaging here in the UK. Some of them have barely changed from the Victorian originals. However, Mr Cardigan tends to get a little annoyed at the number of golden syrup tins and the like that clutter out home, so I am always on the lookout for ways to put my hoard to good use in the home. Useful and beautiful, that's the dream!

What you'll need.

All I did was to super glue these little magnets onto one side of this empty Coleman's Mustard Powder tin, wait for the glue to dry and voila! A handy magnetic container for your fridge or (in my case) boiler. I have used mine to store drawing pins for the pin board opposite, but it would also be a great place to keep a pen to go with my shopping list here.

The great thing is that you can use different sized tins (and more magnets and glue) depending on what you want to store. I have a beautiful Spanish paprika tin that I'm going to do this with, and it would also be great with those larger decorative tins of olive oil you can buy. This project really couldn't be simpler, quicker or cheaper to do, so do have a go yourself!

This said, I made a couple of mistakes which you can avoid... The main thing that I did wrong was to stick the magnets on the wrong way round (dur!). Only one side is magnetic so do check that the magnetic side is facing out before you glue them. If, like me, you stick the wrong side, I simply prised them off with a knife - be careful! - and glued them back the other way round. Since you don't see the magnet side it doesn't actually matter if the tin is chipped, its just a pain to change them. I also didn't put enough magnets to the back to start with, so the weight of the drawing pins meant the tin slid down the front of the boiler. Again, this is easy to fix, just stick on some more magnets until it holds in place!

I hope this little make inspires you to get sticking this week!


PS. I love this shopping list pad, we are now on our second. There is also a meal planner pad too which between them go a long way to helping me keep organised. Both are by Knock Knock and are available to buy on Amazon.

DIY idea: frame your first dance 7"

Happy weekend!

I just wanted to quickly post about this idea my husband had. We bought and were given 7" singles of the song we walked out of the registry office to (The Ramones "Baby I Love You") and our first dance (Fleetwood Mac "Need Your Love So Bad") at our wedding in 2010. He found these frames for singles, they arrived today and we just put them up now.

They looked so great I really wanted to share this idea with you as a not-too-cheesy way to remember your wedding in the form of some great looking wall art. It would also make a great wedding or anniversary present that would be both original, personal and potentially quite cheap. With older sings you could also frame the sheet music.

I hope this post inspires you to dig out some of your favourite singles again and show them the light of day! What ways have you found to commemorate your wedding in your home?

Have a lovely weekend.

PS. Don't you love this Polaroid style frame, complete with vintage sellotape? And the roses, for a wedding-y touch. I am currently in love with the blog bling created by the inspiring Pugly Pixel blog. You can download the rose clip art from Pugly Pixel, and the Polaroid frame I found out about from PP, but is actually from Fuzzimo, which is a complete treasure trove of images and clip art for FREE!

I love that we live in a modern world where such talented, creative people are happy to share so much with the online community for free, this must surely earn you a LOT of good karma - no coming back as a dung beetle for them!

Putting the Sun in Sunday

Morning lovelies,

I thought I would just quickly share with you one of our Sunday traditions here in the Cardigan household - or sometimes a Saturday tradition as well! Since having a baby nearly a year ago, I have found I am always looking to start family traditions that my little boy will grow up with, both for special occasion days but also for ordinary days too. For a few years now, Friday has been homemade pizza night in our house, and I can't wait till little Joe is old enough to pick out his favourite toppings for his own pizza. It is really nice to build in these little treats and markers each week, giving us things to look forward to and a shape to our family life.

Drop Scones on a Sunday Morning

For the last few months our weekend breakfast has been the wholemeal dropscones featured in the River Cottage Everyday book. This is a great book that we use all the time, since, as the name suggests, it has lots of everyday recipes (as opposed to those equally lovely recipe books with lots of dinner party type recipes that are great to use but don't tend to be the ones that end up with wrinkled pages and food splatters from repeated use). Don't be put off by the thought of wholemeal flour, they are so delicious and not at all worthy.

We add sultanas to ours as they cook and serve them with a little bit of salted butter - I think this pretty much negates the health benefits of the wholemeal flour! We usually listen to Cerys Matthews on BBC 6 Music while we are eating them. Here is a picture of the last of our pancakes this morning, along with Mr Cardigan's espresso in the background from my NEW COFFEE MACHINE! My love for the coffee machine is probably the subject of a whole other blog post...

If you would like to make these drop scones you can find the recipe on the River Cottage website or in the original book which you can find on Amazon (and all over the place in shops as well). I have to say, I also have a great affection for this book since my husband bought me an autographed copy for my birthday!

What are your favourite and most used cookery books? And do you have your own family weekend traditions?

Enjoy your Sunday,

Love

Amy Xxx

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