Gill's sewing machine

Welcome to my first design team post ever and I cannot tell you how excited I am to be given the honour of designing of 14 Craft Bar.

 Let me introduce myself. I create to preserve my sanity s my “proper” job is as a children’s surgeon which is extremely busy and can be very stressful. Through crafting I can escape into a different world and find peace in a world full of turmoil. I hope that you will enjoy my crafting journey over the next year as I take you through some of the projects I like to make – my style is quite eclectic with a background of scrapbooking, jewellery making, mixed media crafting thanks to the wonderful Finnabair and more recently flower making. 

I guess my favourite projects are home décor pieces as they take a while to put together and allow me to add loads of little details. 

Be warned they are often product heavy, but you will have loads of bits left for further projects. So, go on, I encourage you to get crafting – whether you choose to copy as near as possible or are simply inspired by my makes pick up your crafty items and enjoy the process of creating something as unique as you are.

For this project I have chosen to work with the big sewing machine MDF piece made by Snipart and available from 14Craft Bar.

Having constructed the main part of the sewing machine I knew that I wanted to add some texture so using structure paste and the geometric stencil. I added a layer to the front and back of the body of the sewing machine. I then used the roses stencil to add detail to the base.

Whilst this was left to dry naturally I made some embellishments using a number of moulds – long ornament, keyhole, decorative swirl and air dry clay.

Once the paste and embellishments were dry, I layered the body of the sewing machine and base together and glued on the long embellishment and key hole before covering with a layer of chalk paint. Whilst I used Americana Décor paint any brand will work so choose the colour you love or one that will work with your own décor.

Once this was dry, I used Decoart ® antiquing cream in patina green to add another layer of colour. The beauty of this paint is that once it is touch dry you can wipe back to reveal variation in colour creating the vintage effect I was looking for.

I added strips of paper from smile ofwinter to the underside and top of the machine edging them with Ranger ® hickory smoke distress oxide ink applied with a sponge dauber . I then highlighted the texture on the machine using Prima® art alchemy vintage was in vintage gold. Again, any gilding wax like product will work just as well.

I then collected my embellishments mostly from 14 Craft Bar but some from my stash.

To embellish the knobs for my machine and for my bottle lids I used flower centres - gem button and  pearl button.

The chipboard dress pieces came from my stash but you could use the snipart dress.

I cut out flowers and butterflies from vintage time 008 and 009, ephemera set and from the paper pad Hugs or Roses.

From my own stash I used – a cotton reel (but you can make your own with the extra pieces in the sewing machine kit), lace (you could use set of laces), metal embellishments, buttons and baker’s twine.

I filled some small glass bottles with microbeads – gold, silver , blue, mixed dark blue shaker.

I then added all of my embellishments to my machine before deciding it needed to sit on have a “table” so I decorated a paper mache box using pieces of paper from the sets used to decorate the sewing machine and some lace before gluing the sewing machine to the lid so that the whole could be functional as well as decorative.