Ooooh new glass Czech buttons from Ebay. Now to make some brooches!
Bluebird xx
Bluebird Jewellery
studio tour with curious clare
Today i have a lovely peek into the studio of Curious Clare. I am lucky enough to have gone to art college with some very talented people and Clare is one of them. She has a Facebook page and a lovely blog.
How inspiring is this as a workspace!
What a talented artist Clare is! Drawing and visual studies was a huge part of our Crafts degree and you can see how much sketchbook work and drawing Clare is still doing.
All the pictures Clare took herself and were on Creative Boom recently which is how I got a glimpse of her studio but I thought I’d ask Clare if I could share them too! She was happy to spread the love with Dandelion and Olive so hope you enjoy her studio loveliness.
Clare’s blog Curious Clare is wonderful and full of images from artists she loves, workshops she has been on, see below for fab creatures she made on a Sally Faulkner workshop and a Samantha Bryan one too, as well as inspiring ideas for you to try and some DIY’s.
Lovely images from Samantha Bryan workshop below.
Clare’s next project is to open an Etsy shop but teaching is getting in the way at the mo so if you’d like a piece of Clare’s work then message her on Facebook.
Thanks Clare for sharing your studio with us all and hurry up with your Etsy shop so we can buy some of your lovely pieces we have been coveting at Dandelion & Olive towers!
Bluebird xx
oooh a party!!!!
When I was in Devon over easter I found a scrapbook of my mums where she had saved lots of party invites from the 60′s, how great are these! The kiddie invites were for my brother and sister.
Bluebird xx
crochet love
I have been shopping for lovely coloured wool with some vouchers and finally chose a nice selection of cream, greens and dusky pinks for a crochet blanket, but what pattern to make! I have decided on granny square style as it’s easier to cart about between home and the caravan when making but i still can’t pin down a pattern. I have of course been using Pinterest to aid my choice so thought I’d share my favourites.
Lovely blanket above from Wood and Wool blog.
Pretty geometric crochet throw found in One Kings Lane shop.
Vintage 70′s crochet from Etsy shop Drowsy Swords, all crocheted in one go but i love it!
Lovely pram blanket from Three Beans in Pod blog.
Lovely blanket at Dottie Angel blog and you can find pattern via Millie Makes blog, after trying this one out I realised it might be best for a smaller project than a bed cover!
I really love the dark background to the above blanket from Moonshine & Wool blog.
After trying out a few patterns I have realised that perhaps I should keep it simple, so something like the above pic from Dottie Angel I think! Those squares look simple enough for a novice like me.
Wish me luck and nimble fingers!
Bluebird xx
Springtime!
I woke up this morning and went outside to drop No 2 son to nursery and I definitely feel like spring is coming. That may well jinks it and tomorrow we will have a snow storm but today I feel the warmth coming, yippee!!
The flowers above were a birthday pressie and as you may have guessed are not in my garden but on the kitchen table.
Bluebird xx
happy new year!
Happy New Year from all of us at Dandelion and Olive.
Thanks for all of your support throughout 2012 we have made some lovely friends and hope to keep growing our facebook connections.
Sorry for our slow start into 2013 its taken a while getting back into the swing of things but we hope to get back into gear now and start all those projects we have set ourselves for the new year.
BB x
Its Christmas!!!!!!!
If you are on the sunny south coast near Brighton and Hove this December then pop along to our open studios. Lots of lovely mulled wine for our visitors and lots of lovely items to put on your lists to santa and to give to your loved ones! Come say hi.
Bluebird xx
diy christmas baubles
I decided to have a break from button brooches today and finally got to play with some honeycomb paper. I bought mine from here on eBay for only a few pounds each piece and as I love clashing colours I went for the 2 tone ones!
I had lots of fun playing with this so thought you might like to see too, I even made a little ad for Pinterest to draw in my followers!
Gather your supplies and tools like above, I also used some really nice thick brown card stock which we had in a drawer, any colour would do, choose what you like or you already have.
1. Design ideas that can be cut out of card to surround your honeycomb bauble. 2. Draw outline onto your card. 3. Fill in your design, mine is simple lines but go crazy if you like! 4. Cut out your card shape.
1. Draw a semi circle on the honeycomb paper, making sure the flat side runs alongside the honeycomb edge. 2. cut out your semi circle and glue to centre of card. 3. Cut piece of thin card 1 mm smaller than honeycomb semi circle and glue onto semi circle top. 4. Your pretty honeycomb is now attached on one side and you have a flat pack decoration.
Now it opens like above. I use a glue dot to keep it open. Then make some more! Then add some ribbon or ric rac and hang ‘em up.
I also made some plain baubles to hang all year round.
My advice is buy some cool honeycomb paper now and have some fun!!!
Bluebird xx
come and be friends!
Here at Dandelion & Olive towers we are dragging ourselves into the technology age………………………..slowly! Both Bunting Boutique and I have finally created Facebook pages so we can keep people updated about going ons here and virtually. I have even worked out how to post Instagram pics from ipad to Facebook too, now that may be simple to you but believe me I nearly went insane just trying to add a clickable link to my shop onto Facebook. I seriously need to employ a teenager for this stuff!
So now you can like us both on Facebook and keep up to date with all our goings on. Go on, click on links below and Like our pages, you know you want to, you might even get special discounts to use in our shop!
Bluebird xx
sunday treats
I escaped! For one weekend afternoon and evening I left the trappings of family life behind and boarded a train to happiness. Some people if asked what they would do if they won the lottery might suggest buying a mansion, maybe an exotic holiday and nice as those things sound not me, if I had unlimited money I would sign up for weekly workshops with interesting people and sit with like minded souls and make things, all sorts of things and that is just what i did the other day! I went to this. The very lovely Alexandra Smith of Lola Nova blog was in London giving a workshop to celebrate the release of her new book Simple Sewing with Lola Nova.
Here is lovely Alex helping and encouraging and generally giving us all lots of insight into how she works.
It was very difficult to remember not to call her Lola but it is so nice to meet in person someone you have followed online. She came with a lovely assistant, the wonderful Jane from Flaming Nora who helped out and brought lots of lovely fabrics for us to play with. They worked really well together and had a few tales of their London wanderings to tell us too!
We all got to rifle through a stash of fabric, ribbons, buttons, ric rac, bias binding and more, oh how I love another persons fabric stash.
She got us to work on her patches project from the book so we played with colour palettes, textures and generally made our own thing! Look at that pretty fabric spine notebook, Alex made us all one for the workshop.
It was so lovely to sit and sew and pin and chat and meet some lovely women. Here is the group, minus Nora who stood in for David Bailey at this point.
And here are some of the nearly completed pieces we made.
Such a lovely evening and I just have 1 button to sew on, I was slightly tempted to ‘borrow’ (ahem) the whole set of these buttons you see on my piece for one of my button brooches but I was restrained and proper! I also learnt how to sew bias binding onto a curve so I came home very happy indeed.
So check out the lovely Lola Nova blog if you haven’t already and put Simple Sewing on your Christmas list now. So when you next see a flyer for a workshop you fancy book it up and have some fun!
Bluebird xx
PS I promise I will show you some lovely pages from the book soon but it is evening and my pics will look horrid under artificial light so i will keep you waiting!
baking and making
Who knew that 6 weeks without a cooker would end with me baking so many oven goodies! I have baked crumbles, cheese scones, banana and cinnamon cake and cheese and courgette muffins as well as roasts with yorkshire puddings and more roast potatoes than is probably good for anyone.
Having a kitchen also means we have more space so I broke out something creative for after school and whilst the boys made dinosaur Hama shapes and airplane wings I used one of my Pinterest pins to make a little fox.
Here is the pin I used to make Foxy
Source: flickr.com via Bluebird on Pinterest
Can’t wait til we have all rooms in use and my sewing machine comes out of summer hibernation!
Bluebird xx
autumn tastes
We are a house of crumble lovers here and once the summer starts to fade the hedges around the caravan start to drip with free berries of the best kind, yes its blackberry season! So i planned in advance and made sure I had a nice stash of cooking apples and made up a batch of Rose Elliots crumble topping and off we pottered for a night in the caravan.
Yummy. If you haven’t made blackberry and apple crumble yet this month then get yourelf out with tupperware in hand and search those hedgerows for beautiful purple fruit and get baking!
Here is Rose Elliot’s crumble recipe
225g plain wholemeal flour
2tsp baking powder
175g butter or vegan margarine
175g Demerara sugar
Cook as you would normally, this is such a tasty crumble and you don’t usually need to add sugar your fruit mixture.
(I am unsure if you are allowed to post other peoples recipes but as this one is available via The Guardian website I have put it in.)
Bluebird xx
Ferm Living Dollhouse
I’ve long been a fan of danish interiors company, Ferm Living. I’ve longed to have a house which can carry off the wallpaper, but now these dreams have become a reality as they’ve recently brought out the Ferm Living Dollhouse, perfect for miniature scandinavian design enthusiasts. Simply download the miniature wallpaper, print it, stick it and voila! your very own dream home. Ferm Living even supply the dollhouse if you’re starting from scratch
And some of my fav Ferm Living Wallpaper designs…
Vintage caravan and some sunshine
We are in the chaos of moving home at the moment but we did squeeze a short break at the Airstream the other day and I went Instagram crazy!
Mr Bluebird has a slight addiction to chopping wood so the next pic is for him
On the last morning we woke up to rain but that didn’t stop me and my ipad going for a photo stroll!
And we returned to more of this
Roll on next month when the move will be over and we wont be eating freezer leftovers all week!
Bluebird xx
The Krups Clock
If ever there was a clock that i’ve needed in my life, more specifically kitchen then this is it. It’s been on the shopping list in my head for a while now which I refer to when visiting charity shops, boot sales or my daily scout through eBay. Anyway I thought i’d share it’s beauty with you as it is a lovely clock and also as a way of cataloguing it for myself incase my mental shopping list ever slips away.
Image courtesy of ‘Present & Correct‘ a really lovely online store selling stationary, vintage bits and bobs and much more.
