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

Make it: Fabric Flower Brooch from 'Buttons and Paint'

Today we have a lovely guest DIY from Buttons and Paint blog. We came across their blog one night on Twitter and Sammy realised that the girls live just down the road from us so we got in touch, the rest is history, we have guest posted on their blog with Liberty Print Button Rings and now it's their turn on ours, take it away girls!

Hello, we are Simi and Sian and we share our crafty adventures on our blog, Buttons and Paint! We're really excited to be able to guest post for Sammy and H, and share how to make a Fabric Flower Brooch.

We took inspiration from a great post by Little Livingstone, and chose this type as Gerberas are some of our favourite flowers!

To make these flowers you will need to cut 10 circles from your fabric. Our circles were 2 inches in diameter and we used a jar to trace around, so that each one was the same size. Fold each circle in half and then in half again.

Take your folded circle and sew a couple of stitches to keep it in place. To form the petal shape, sit it on the flat edge and fold down the edges. This is similar to folding down a shirt collar! Then make each section by sewing two petals together at the bottom point.

To create the flower shape, sew the five separate sections together using a long thread.  Pull the thread tight and secure it in place with some stitches on the back.

Don't worry if the middle looks a bit scrappy as the next part will cover a multitude of sins! We decided that our flower would look pretty as a brooch, so we glued a piece of felt and a brooch pin to the back. Then the front was decorated with a button (any excuse to use buttons!!)

And that's all there is to it!

We really enjoyed making this fabric flower and now we've got the hang of it, we'll definitely be making more with different colours and fabrics. We reckon they'd make lovely presents - perhaps for a last minute Mother's Day present? What would you use yours for?

Sian & Simi x

A big thanks to the girls for showing us how to make these adorable brooches! If you want to see more of their blog head over to Buttons and Paint to check it out, you can also find the girls in all the usual places…. Twitter / Facebook / Pinterest