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!

Our Celebration of Sewing

This weekend we had our annual celebration of sewing which takes the form of The Hope & Gloria Junior Sewing Bee Grand Final.

In my last post I explained how we reached this point through round one of the competition and yesterday afternoon Allison, Debbie, Sarah, and Sophie from the Hope & Gloria Team and I guided our amazing finalists through the last stage of the annual competition.

One of my absolute favourite aspects of my role at Hope & Gloria is designing all of the projects that we make in our clubs. Yesterday afternoon I was delighted to hand the designing reins over to thirty of our sewing club members so that they designed and made their own cushions and bags in a bid to win first prize in 2016.

This year we had two overall winning categories - one for school years 3& 4 and one for school years 5 & 6. After seeing the brilliant creations from round one, it was no surprise that this year's standard was incredibly high and choosing just one cushion from each category was very difficult.

Follow the yellow arrows below to see the winning entries....

Our winner in the younger age category was Amber Moores from Warfield Primary School who gave us a well thought out design that showed a brilliant understanding of the use of colour and space as well as beautiful stitching for her age.

Hannah Mackie was our first prize winner in the older age group. Hannah managed to sew designs on to the front and back of her cushion in the allocated time of 75 minutes - a daytime scene on the front and night time one on the back featuring the moon and a bat. The back of the cushion also featured a pocket for a tooth for the tooth fairy to collect. Hannah's inventiveness of design, function and beautiful stitching meant that this was a truly well deserved first place.

Well done to Amber and Hannah! Also, I must also say a huge well done to all of our contestants that joined us yesterday - you were all amazing and I don't think I have ever found it so hard to judge a competition.

I am happy to report that no-one left empty-handed. As well as taking home their beautiful creations, all of the girls were given a goody bag containing Hope & Gloria sewing supplies and some sweet treats.

Well done once again to everyone - we hope to see you all again at next years Hope & Gloria Junior Sewing Bee!

A Gallery of Gorgeous Bags!

Every year Hope & Gloria bag projects are incredibly popular. They are always lots of fun to design. For this year's bags I came up with a satchel design using lots of lovely bright and bold coloured felt. In order for our sewing club members to add their own individual touches to the bags I also added a simple badge project which turned out to be lots of fun with many amazing creations being made across all of the 32 Hope & Gloria Sewing Clubs.

As always our sewing enthusiasts excelled themselves and the finished project were quite simply beautiful. A HUGE "Well done!" and a big round of applause to all of the Hope & Gloria club members for all of the brilliant work last half term.

Here are some of the completed bags...

Crowthorne CE Primary School

Dorney Primary School

Oaklands Junior School

Also, last half term I was lucky to spend some time with an amazing group of young carers teaching them to sew at what is to become a monthly workshop that I have organised in conjunction with The Windsor and Maidenhead Young Carers Service. I was joined by Tanya - one of my team of lovely Hope & Gloria Sewing Club Leaders and together we are volunteering our time to give this group of inspiring young people some time out to be creative.

We were amazed by their positive outlook and also be their creative skills and can't wait to see them again next week when we'll be making pencil cases.

I look forward to sharing the results of our next workshop with you. In the meantime here are a few of the beautiful cushions that were made. Just Fabulous!