Now this isn't a tutorial as it's fairly simple to do but I will give you the benefit of what I have learnt making one!


This is what we are making - a button wreath. It's basically a Styrofoam ring and I covered mine in some grey velvet ribbon to hide the whiteness. I used simple flat pins to pin the ribbon to the styrofoam so if I get bored of my button wreath, I can undo the ribbon and use it for something else!


This is it halfway through - you can see why I needed the grey ribbon as the buttons (try as you might!) don't fit together easily and there will be small gaps. I wanted something that would blend in to the background but of course you could exploit the background and allow more to show through.


You will of course need buttons and because I have so, so many, I wanted to place them closely together but if you have less buttons then spaced out would be fab too* I used pins with balls on the end to add the buttons to the wreath. You can glue gun the buttons on but I wanted the option of being able to reuse them if I ever got bored with the wreath. I used one pin per button apart from on a couple of antique buttons where I used two - better safe than sorry! One thing I will point out is that you will need a lot of pins :) I bought 160 cream ended pins and used them all up with about 2 inches of wreath still to cover! Luckily I had some spare coloured ones that worked well too.

It's getting to that time of year where we all tend to look back on what has happened in the past 12 months and of course I am no exception. Over the past 12 months I have had 35,605 page views which seems quite a lot to me! I've gone through my analytics and have found the most popular blog posts over the past year. Most weren't written this year but they have been popular over the past 12 months!




Not surprisingly the top spot goes to the post that describes how to make your own padded envelopes. It's not surprising as it has been shared on lots of blogs!




The second spot goes to my post about a local fabric shop. Maybe it's because you can get fabric there for £1 a metre?




The third spot goes to the easy peasy jam recipe using a microwave. Very, very easy!




This next post is from 2007 and isn't it amazing to look back at your progress over the years? It's for a brooch tutorial and I think it was the first ever tutorial I did. I was going to delete it (as it's a bit naff) but if it's the 4th popular post looked at over the past year then it can stay!




Another tutorial and this one uses old Christmas cards to make garlands ready for next year! A good bit of reuse I think!




This post was all about a fair in Clitheroe and showed off my new chicken packaging too!




The next post deals with the raffle I held with Jo on behalf of the Japanese people affected by the earthquake and resulting tsunami.




And the last post (I could go on and on but I'd better not) is all to do with fashion - or my version of fashion anyway! It seems that people agree with me about red and green not being seen together!


So what have I learnt from this? That people like tutorials certainly so hopefully there will be more of those in 2012 :)


Come back tomorrow for a little look at my favourite makes from 2011.

You may have noticed the big 'New Skills Festival' banner on the right that has been up since the start of September? It is being run by Jo over at A Bit of This and A Bit of That and today it is my turn to share some skills.


I have shared my tutorial on how to make your own padded envelopes from upcycled goodies so feel free to pop over and have a look. Thanks for hosting Jo and make sure to keep an eye out as there are lots of skills being shown off over there!

I normally use our old Christmas cards to make gift tags for next year but we already have a huge bag of them and didn't really need this years adding to that pile! So I was really pleased when I came across this tutorial that I had saved a while back about re-using your Christmas cards for a garland. I dug out my trusty circle punch and punched out all the cards that were big enough to fit in the punch - the smaller ones were added to the tag bag for next year.

The tutorial tells you to glue your circles to the ribbon but I wanted something that would last being thrown in a box year after year so decided to stitch them to the ribbon. I also put two circles back to back so if the garland twists then you still have pretty things to see!





Ta Dah! The finished garland. It was very quick and easy to do as well and you can obviously make it as long as you like. I just used up what ribbon I had.





I then had some circles left over and decided to make little ornaments with them - again very simple but quite effective. They are simple felt circles with felt offcuts/ribbon sandwiched between the felt and card and then sewn.

Look what the clever ladies over at Craftsville have been making.

Some rather fetching padded envelopes using a very clever person's tutorial :D Oh that would be my tutorial!!

Materials you will need:

Paper – something strong like book pages/wallpaper. I wouldn’t recommend magazines.

Bubblewrap – I get mine free from the fruit and veg aisle at the supermarket. Just make sure you ask first!

Scissors

Double sided sticky tape along with normal sticky tape

Paper cutter (optional)


How to do it:

Gather two pieces of paper and ensure that they are roughly the same size (you can trim stray edges later). Choose which is going to be the front of the envelope and which is going to be the back. The back piece needs to have about half an inch cut off it at the top.


Turn your back piece over so that the inside of the envelope is facing up. Don’t start with the front piece as the bubble wrap will end up in the way later! The add a small strip of double sided tape around the outside of the paper.

Cut yourself 2 piece of bubble wrap that fit inside the tape and then peel the backing off the top strip of tape and stick one piece of bubble wrap to it. You may need additional tape behind the bubblewrap near the bottom to secure it firmly.

Take your second piece of bubblewrap and place it on top of the other piece. Add tape to the back of the bubblewrap as seen

Peel off all the backing and place the front of the envelope onto the top of the bubblewrap.

You’ll need to postion it carefully but don’t worry if the edges don’t match up perfectly – you can trim them later. Your envelope will now look like a sandwich

You will now need to press around the outside of the envelope to stick the 2 pieces of paper together.



And voila – you have a padded envelope made from reclaimed paper!

You can have fun and use lots of different papers. The extra inch on the front piece can be folded down to make the lip of your envelope which can be secured by tape. I also keep scraps of plain paper to use as address labels.

To show you how to upload your photographs to groups. First you will need to go to the individual photo page that looks like this.

Then just above the photo is a row of grey commands - one of them says send to group. Click on it and something like this will come up.


Just click on the group that you want to send the photo to - then something like this will come up to confirm that you have sent it to that group. Just click OK.

You can easily see which groups your photo is in by looking to the right of the photo and a list will come up - see below!


Now this method works really well if you only have a few photo's to upload to a group - I'll now show you how to use the organize section for uploading photo's to groups.

You'll need to look at the top of your photo's page and in the main section there is an organize button. Click on it and it will take you to the page below.

Your photo's come up along the bottom and all you need to do is drag them into the grey section in the middle. Once you have put your photo's into the middle then there is another send to group button - at the right on the pic below.

Do that and the instructions are just the same as the individual photo upload. If you drag a photo in that you don't want then simply drag it back out again. You can also change the permissions on your photographs from the organize section - it makes it much easier to do a batch at once.

I'm writing this tutorial as some people aren't sure how to upload photo's to groups and rather than tell each person individually then I can just direct them here!! Don't forget to visit my groups on Flickr too UK Craftsforum, Children's art and craft, Cuteable and Etsy Treasury Screenshots.

Hope this helps - shout if not - and feel free to link to this and tell other people!