Making It Magical! Our End of School Year Gallery...

Well done to all of the talented sewing enthusiasts who created the most amazing projects last half term. I'd like to give a special shout out to all of the year 6 "Hope & Gloria" graduates who left our clubs to head on to new sewing pastures at secondary school. You will be missed and are wished all of the very best luck in your new schools - keep sewing.

This year all of our "graduates" were given a certificate in recognition of their amazing sewing skills that all of The Hope & Gloria Team hope will remind them of the fun and creative times spent in our sewing clubs.

One of our very talented year 6 club members, Jessica from St. Ann's Heath Junior School brought in the very first project that she made with Hope & Gloria when she was in year 3 - an owl. It was lovely to contrast her first and final sewing club projects and it's always lovely to see how far children progress with their sewing skills during their time in our clubs. A huge "Well Done!" to Jessica.

Here are some other lovely projects that were stitched with skill and love last half term by our sewing club members. As always their creativity is truly brilliant. Have a lovely summer everyone and we look forward to seeing you all again in September!

The Land of Make Believe

Being the Mum of three boys, there aren't usually any unicorns or fairy houses to be found in our house. Over the years there have been one or two dragon themed books, films and toys here but generally nothing of the magical girlie variety.

Therefore, it was a real treat for me to design the projects for the Hope & Gloria Sewing Clubs for last half term. The theme I had chosen was "Make It Magical". People often ask me where I get the ideas for our sewing clubs projects from and often it can be as simple as listening to our club members talking about things they love and magical creatures always seem to come up in conversation. Knowing how much our sewing club members love unicorns, they just had to form part of the range.

As always the design challenge I face is to come up with a project that will produce smiley faces for new and experienced stitchers and my unicorns can be made as simply or as decoratively as required. By this stage in the school year many of our sewing enthusiasts have mastered a few decorative techniques which can be put to use with these cute toys. Here are examples of the more decorative variety that I stitched along week by week with the children in my clubs to give them stitching ideas for their unicorns:

I think my favourite project from The Land of Make Believe were my Toadstool Fairy Houses. Super-cute and as we discovered in our clubs, ideal for letting children's creativity run wild, they make a really adorable decoration.

Again, there were lots of options for personalising and decoration. I think any fairy would love to make a home in one of these magical houses. Here are two of my examples:

I wrote about our final project option - the adorable baby dragon in a previous post. He proved to be very popular amongst our club members (nearly as popular as the unicorns), proving that there is still a lot of love out there for these gorgeous mythical creatures!

We had a fantastic final half term of the year at Hope & Gloria. It's now the end of July, I have already designed our September projects and over the summer hols I'll be thinking about Christmas!In my next post I'll be sharing pictures of our club members finished projects - why not take a look to see how brilliantly our sewing club members "Made It Magical!"

Happy Summer Everyone, and Happy Sewing!