Love it: UK Craft Blogs #1

We write a crafty blog, so it is only natural that we gravitate towards other creative folk, we have a looonnnggg blog roll on Bloglovin of blogs we love and we have shared some of our faves here before. We love bloggers and blogs from all over the world, a lot of our favourites are from across the pond in the USA, A Beautiful Mess, Sugar and Cloth, Lovely Indeed, Paper and Stitch and the list goes on, but in this series we want to give a shout out to our favourites from right here, our home, the United Kingdom!

Burkatron

Caroline is a beautiful fashion/craft blogger and self confessed nail art junkie, I always love the photography styling in her posts. Her DIY's are always pretty and super chic. Our fave recent post is this one about building your own terrarium.

Buttons and Paint

These two lovelies live just down the road from us in Reading, You may remember them from their guest post for us back in March or you may have popped over from our guest post on their blog. We love this recent DIY to make yourself a trimmings folder, a must have for any haberdashery hoarder.

Claireabelle Makes

We don't know how the lovely Claire manages to run her own (super cute) etsy shop, her blog and have a job, but she does it, and beautifully too! We are crushing hard on her Bicycle Bracelets at LiLiMi HQ.

Who are your favourites?  This is the first in a series of posts about UK based craft blogs, our favourite fellow Brits doing wonders for bringing crafts out of the dark ages. Tell us in the comments about your faves so we can include them in later posts and crush on their mad DIY skills of course.

Sammy xxx

Hilary's Blinds Country Crafts Competition...Win £1000

Photo Courtesy of Hillarys Blinds

Do you craft? Do you blog? Do you like fabric? Do you want the chance to win £1000????

We know that a lot of you guys do, so today we have a little craft competition especially for you, courtesy of the lovely Hillarys Blinds for the chance to win £1000!

Hillarys approached us to be judges for their Country Craft Competition for craft bloggers and we were so happy to be a part of it. We will be judging all the entries alongside Hilary from Craft Blog UK, Rosie & Hannah from The New Craft Society, Caroline from Burkatron and the Hillarys design team.  It is an honour to be on a panel with these inspirational, British, crafty ladies!  

To enter the competition, all you need to do is:

Pop over to the Hillarys competition page HERE.

Fill in the contact form and choose which one of the four Country Retreat fabrics you would like to use in your project. (they are free!)

A 1m x 1m piece of your chosen material will be sent to you.

Put your creative talents to the test by making an original craft project or design using the fabric and you can add any other materials you want for the project.

Here is where being a blogger is key... Publish a blog post with photos, describing how you made your entry and don’t forget to mention the competition page in your post.

Submit your entry by email to: dominic.bryce@hillarys.co.uk

The competition opens today, Monday 17th February 2014 and requests for fabric will close on Monday 17th March 2014.

You will have an additional 2 weeks after 17^th March to make your blog post live. So you will be able to request fabric up until 17^th March and then have until 31^st March to publish your blog post and send the link over to Dominic.  The Winner will be announced on 14th April 2014.

When all submissions have been judged by Hillarys designers and the 'Craft Bloggers' panel, the winner will be contacted by email.

Hillarys have asked that you put the name of the blog where you found the competition in the ‘Where did you hear about the competition?’ section. So pop in Live it. Love it. Make it. if you saw it here <3

Hillarys were kind enough to send us some samples of the fabrics so we could give you some inspiration. We customised a denim jacket with the gorgeous Peacock design, with the help of some Bondaweb and sequin embellishments. Sammy made a fold over clutch bag from her favourite fabric and we covered a clipboard with some more of the peacock print. The fabric was so lovely to work with, not too heavy, but sturdy enough to be hard wearing. The colours are so lovely and the print quality is just superb.

If you want to see a tutorial on covering a clipboard in fabric head over to Claireabelle makes blog and check out the guest post from fellow judge Caroline (Burkaton).

We wish you all the best of luck and can't wait to see what you all make with Hillarys gorgeous fabrics! Don't forget to let us know too, you can tweet or Instagram us with #livelovemake so we can take a look.

H and Sammy xxx

Disclaimer: This post has been sponsored by Hillarys Blinds.  We believe in honesty of relationship, opinion and identity.