The Birthday Season

Starts today! Today is the first of 7 birthdays in a period a little over a month long. I have created this little number as a sweet way of presenting some birthday clothes money for my SIL L. Not everyone will be getting hand stitched goodness in their birthday presents, this is a special birthday as L hits the big 3-0.

The majority of the birthdays are for very small children so a bumper buying session at a toy shop is on the cards. As I am such a geek I have calculated that the average age reached is 11, the average was elevated by the aforementioned L and K, my sister.

This little keepsake cache is stitched together from a project from a book by Kumiko Sudo "Kokoro-No-Te" - Handmade from the heart in English. I have made a few projects from this book mainly useful things like pincushions and needlecases for myself and buddies I know who actually sew (apart from my C&G class - these people are few and far between). I decided to use some of my guilty quilt fabric purchases for this project as well as some pink viscose wool felt I had left over from previous projects and some silk/cotton mix for the buds. The little beads were subsituted for the recommended larger beads because I couldn't face trying to find my bead stash in the loft.

The projects in the book are exquisite and generally are straight forward - although like any project its worth reading it through beforehand. They are quite time consuming because they all almost exclusively rely on hand sewing. It would be difficult to construct the projects on the machine without signficant changes in the nature of the finished result. By the time you had done that you may as well have made it by hand.