Birthday Crafting

Last week was one of my bestest friends 30th birthdays. It happens to the best of us this getting old thing. As she lives in London I don't see her much, but we had a lovely, wine filled, night together at my brothers bar with her fiancée and the Boy over the bank holidays period where she seemed elated at being the last of us in our 20's and then she brought her beautiful baby boy round to see my mum, which gave me a chance to give her her gifts to take home. 


I have known for a LONG time what I was making her for her birthday. In fact I had a number of ideas, but after mulling them over, one is much better as a wedding gift {its not for a long while, so maybe it'll get given to her earlier} and the others might not have worked very well yet - my sewing skills aren't quite where they need to be........


But for starters, I made her a 'Party in a box' – the idea came from this guest post by You Are My Fav.
The box included;

• A mini bottle of champers and a glass.
• Cake mix with icing frosting rather then buttercream {lizzie isn’t a frosting fan} and a recipe card and cake cases. 
• Candles.
• Balloons.
• Some birthday confetti – erm, sorry about that – I bet its not easy to clean up.
• A garland made from cut out paint chips.
• And the must have 30 badge!

Then I turned to my sewing machine, printed out the very easy to follow pattern from U-handbag and made this 'For Pleats Sake' handbag. 

Actually that makes it sound like I whipped it up in an hour. Unfortunately it took a little longer than that and involved a bit of swearing, a lot of needles being stuck in my fingers and some confusion - but the tutorial has some easy to follow pictures that accompany pretty much every stage of the bag making and in the end I am pretty pleased with how it turned out. 

What do you think? 

{I bought the Cath Kidston fabric in a particular moment when i was misguidedly feeling flush with cash, and being the sewing novice I am, I bought WAY too much of it, but I am excited that there is enough to make at least another bag out of it. If not something else fun. The lining is a solid pink that co-ordinates with the pink in the flowers and the handles aren't the ones the tutorial as they had sold out, but they were easy enough to find on Ebay. }