Steampunk Pillow Box

A pillow box I made for the Fiskarettes UK Facebook page

Cut and score a pillow box shape from brown card and dab with copper ink pad to give a metallic finish. 

Emboss a strip of silver card and copper card with metal effect embossing folders, distress with diluted black paint and layer with black paper to form a band round the box.  Wrap with twine.

Use the hexagon punch and a circle die or punch to make a bolt shape from Kraft card, dab with copper ink pad, distress with dilute black paint and add texture with black glitter glue.  When dry, coat with embossing ink and clear emboss.  Add a punched tag made from silver card with twine and add a peel-off greeting to finish.

Carrier Bag Holder

Now that carrier bags have suddenly become precious items I thought they deserved something better than being shoved in the back of the cupboard!  Here's a "proper" carrier bag holder that I made for Fiskarettes UK.

Very quick and easy make to hold all those precious carrier bags we are now hoarding.  But why shouldn’t it be pretty?

 

Cut a piece of fabric 50cm by 40 cm.  I used a Fiskars rotary cutter and a ruler to get nice straight lines.

Fold it in half right sides together and sew the long sides together to form a tube.  Press the seam open and neaten the raw edges. Turn over 1cm each open end of the tube and press, then turn over another 1cm each end and press again.  This forms the casings for the elastic. 

Pin and sew along the edge of the casing, starting just after the seam and finishing just before the seam, leaving enough room to thread 20cm of 0.5cm wide elastic through each casing. 

TIP: Fasten a safety pin to the leading end of the elastic to make it easier to feed it through, and use another to anchor the other end to the fabric to make sure it doesn’t disappear. 

Overlap the ends of the elastic by 1cm and hand stitch.  Slip stitch the rest of the casing closed and repeat at the other end.

Form a hanging loop with 20cm of ribbon and stitch to the top end of the tube where the seam is so this becomes the back.

I die-cut some flowers using Tim Holtz’ Tattered Floral dies in felt to match the colours of the fabric, layered them up and stitched them in place using buttons as the centre of the flowers.