Wifely Christmas presents 2012

As mentioned in yesterday's post, the gifts my wife and I exchanged on Christmas deserved their own post.

As far as the gift my wife gave me, I knew where it had come from (a vintage fair that happens every Thursday in Oxford), I knew it was rather heavy and I knew roughly how large it was as it happened to reside in the bottom of our wardrobe for around a month and a half! Aside from these things, I had absolutely no idea what I'd be unwrapping on Christmas day, but was über über excited to unwrap a beautiful typewriter! This was an especially thoughtful present on my wife's behalf as there had been one in a Grenoble shop that I walked past every day for a couple of months, longing for. My wife had also repainted, oiled and changed the ribbon of this typewriter, making it (presumably) more gorgeous.

As my wife's birthday is at the end of October, I sometimes find it difficult to think of something to give her for Christmas. This was the case for quite a while, until I decided on making a snowglobe and some silhouette art. Both of these ideas came from my favourite inspirational site, Pinterest! Even once I'd decided on making each of these gifts, I wasn't entirely sure about how they would look, so I went for a supply buying trip one weekend, having made a rough list of the things I needed.

In the end, both of the presents were made over two evenings in December, when I had the flat to myself as my wife was back in Kent attending interviews. As such, I spent those evenings fully emersed in my crafting, and completely forgot to take any photographs! Fail.

I made the silhouette pictures first, using frames that I purchased at Wilkinson. I knew that I didn't want a back to the frames so that they could ultimately go in any room as the wall colour would simply show through the frame. I therefore used the glass from two seperate frames to sandwich the silhouette and lettering, making two pieces - one of my wife and one of myself. The silhouette and lettering themselves were made from printed images which I cut out using my craft knife and then spray-painted black. This was a simple enough process, with the trickiest part being to make each part the right size, but after a little trial and error I ended up with the design I wanted and here are the finished products:

Moving on to the second part of the gift-making, the snowglobe. To make this, I bought glycerin, a large jam jar, some decorative crystals and smallish Christmas decorations, and some silver glitter. I also knew that I wanted to put an image of my wife and I in the snowglobe, so used one of us from last winter in the snowy mountains of Grenoble. I cut out the image in a size small enough to fit in the jar, and then laminated it twice to protect it from the water. I then used my hot glue gun to glue the image onto the pre-sprayed lid of the jar, proceeding to use the crystals to stabilise the image. During this part, I tried to ensure that I attached each crystal securely as I knew that the jar would obviously be shaken and I didn't want things coming loose. Once the glue was dry and everything had settled, I put some silver glitter and some star confetti that I already had into the jar, and filled it up with water and a little glycerin. I then checked on the water level by screwing the lid on, and once I was satisfied with it, I hot glued around the edge of the jar and screwed the lid back on. Ta-da, one finished snowglobe!

So there you have it, wifely presents of Christmas, 2012 :D

Home shadowboxes

For a while now I've liked the look of projects like this one on Pinterest, and thought that I'd use this idea, combined with pictures of places my wife and I have lived to make some shadowboxes. 

So, during December we took a trip to Hobbycraft to pick up some supplies. We managed to get two white shadowboxes and some wooden numbers, as we already have a fair supply of crafty bits for projects like this one. We also decided that we'd use photos of the property and add in scrapbooking items like tickets or receipts from memorable events in our life from when we lived in that place. 

Here is a shot of halfway through the process of making one of the shadowboxes:

We simply used the piece of paper in the frame to stick our memorabilia items on, making use of almost anything we found in our memory boxes. The photo above shows the shadowbox for our apartment in Grenoble, and uses things like train tickets, our supermarket loyalty card and a take-away menu. We positioned these items around the edges of the paper, leaving enough room to put in a 6"x4" photo of the apartment in the middle. Then we placed wooden numbers and letters in the foreground of the shadowbox by sandwiching them between the glass and the wooden frame that holds the whole box together. I didn't feel the need to secure them any more than this as it seemed to work! Finally, I simply added the road name to the top of the photo using a Sharpie. 

And the final product looked like this:

Then the process was simply repeated for our home back in Kent, using the supplies we could find, including our key.

So there we have two shadowboxes, documenting the places we've lived and reminding us of some of the things that happened while we lived there. We intend to create one of these for each property we live in, and have already made a mental list of items we might like to include when we move out of our current apartment!

Laying out the Birthday Blanket

I set myself a target to complete the Birthday Blanket during our time here in Grenoble, and in this post I had only thirty-nine days to finish the knitting of 46 more squares! I'd like to announce that I've managed this; all 121 squares for the blanket are finished, hooray!

This is them, all of them:

You'll notice in this picture that the cream coloured squares aren't yet blocked. 

So, I figured I'd best lay out this blanket just to check that it looked good in its final design still (although I don't really know what I'd have done if it didn't...)

This is the blanket in the configuration that I drew out on paper

But, as I'd already suspected, the top left quarter was looking a little dark with the brown and purple squares. I therefore swapped out the purple ring from that quarter for the red ring in the bottom right corner, and we had this ...

More balanced, don't you think?

Now I just need to sew all 121 squares together ... not sure that'll get done before we go back to England, but at least all the knitting is done! (...other than the border which will be done at some point, but shhh)

Dalbe

On Sunday, during our leaving Grenoble barbecue, I was given a gift voucher for Dalbe by my wife's boss. Dalbe (as I found out) is an art shop here in France and so yesterday evening me and my wife wandered down to our local one to have a look-see. 

This is the bag we came out with:

Most of the contents are for a particular project which I'll get to later (hopefully this week), but I also picked up a magnet kit which I put together this morning.

Following the nice French instructions, I managed to make us a magnet to remember our time here in Grenoble.

I began by cutting out the guide for the design, and taping it to the table so it didn't move. Then the first sticky sheet was laid sticky-side-up on top of that. 

 Then it was time to begin laying out the mosaic tiles

Until all the tiles had been laid and I put the second sticky sheet sticky-side-down on top

The next step was the trickiest as it required me to flip the mosaic upside down and remove the first sticky sheet. Unfortunately the tiles liked that sheet more and were reluctant to come off this first sheet so it took a little while and some repositioning to get the sheet off.

But, it did happen! And then I could stick the mosaic to the magnet, yay

After flipping the magnet back over and pressing down the tiles to make sure they were stuck securely to the magnet, the second sticky sheet came off and our magnet went onto the fridge.

There you go, one Grenobloise-esque magnet :D

Turning twenty-two

Today is my twenty-second birthday, and I woke up to a beautifully colourful card and box from my wife.

Inside the little box was a teeny book.

Enclosed in a little pouch in the middle of the book was a gorgeous 16th century Grenoble coin to commemorate our time here.

To give you an idea of size, this coin is about as big as my thumbnail!

The idea is to add this coin to my charm bracelet, which will require us working out exactly how with the help of our lovely jeweller when we're back home. 

Add in messages from family and friends back home in England and the prospect of pizza later on this evening and it's turning out to be a rather good birthday :D

Also appearing to celebrate the day with me is the weather, it being 28°C and looking like this: