Quite some time ago …

… long before I would have called sewing or crafting a serious hobby, I already liked to custom-make presents. That might actually be a long-term side effect of spending many hours in day-care as a little kid, where we’d always have been crafting something and make presents for parents and grandparents on any possible (and impossible) occasion.

Now that you know this little fact about me, it cannot come as a surprise to you that when it came to planning my wedding, there had to be something in it for our guests that was specifically me (or us). The first thing occurring to me, of course, was designing our own invitations – but then we came across beautiful cards which we spent hours imprinting instead of crafting. Next thought? Place cards, naturally! Place cards… well … did they have to be cards? I also wanted to give wedding favours to our guests, and I’d read about an Italian tradition – to give five sugar-covered almonds away in a bag. Now, I don’t like sugar-covered almonds very much and the colours at our wedding were going to be light greens and lots of white and there is the Bonbonmacherei in Berlin making oh so lovely and delicious candies from old recipes on old machines (if you’ve ever been there, you’ll never forget that wonderful smell! If you haven’t and you’ve got a chance to, go!), yes, it had to be theire green may-leaves. Since they also look beautiful putting them in a box was no option – they were supposed to be showcased, not hidden away! So I decided on making tulle-bags to put the candy in, closing the bags with white ribbons. It was a tiny step from there to coming up with the idea that these could also serve as our very unique place cards and I embroidered each guest’s first name on their bag. We ended up additionally posting a seating chart to avoid confusion. So, I embroidered all these names, and basically I just used the tulle’s structure and weaved the thread through it – so you can’t really call it embroidery. Sometimes during the process I hated myself for having come up with this idea but I did love the way the little wedding favour place cards looked on the tables. Most guests took their’s home, so I’m inclined to believing that day liked it, too. Here are two pictures of what they looked like:

wedding favour

wedding favour 2

Another quite old project that I’ve been wanting to post here for a while is a quilt I’ve made for my sister. I’ve spent 6 weeks in Alabama in 2003, where I’ve found very nice friends. During that time at their house I really got to like the idea of quilts and I thought how wonderful it would be to be able to make one myself. So, back home, I bought a book describing the technique and presenting me with a couple of designs. I chose one involving log-cabin blocks, spent hours in the fabric store to get the colours I liked and started working. During the process I ended up buying a cutting bord, a ruler and a rotary cutter – all of which I had deemed unnecessary at the beginning. Then I cut squares and stripes for weeks and assembled them to blocks and those to rows. At christmas – when I’d planned to have the quilt ready, my sister found half the quilt top in her box. I think she got the entire quilt around easter…

Although, when you look closely, there are many imperfections, but I still like the way this first (and so far only) quilting project turned out:

Quilt, upper part

and the other half:

Quilt, lower part

Hope you like it, too!

Katrin