Birthday Blossoms

Today is my friend Maggie's Birthday and I wanted to send her a little something that I hoped she'd really appreciate. I hope she doesn't mind me showing these few photos of her lovely home here on my blog - I took them back in 2007/8, when I was writing my book.

As you can see, Maggie has a certain signature style, which is what I hoped to capture in her gift and card.

For Maggie's Birthday card, I was inspired by Lilla's brilliant tutorial here. I had some pale pink vintage velvet and various tulle and voiles to make my own version of her blossoms - Three of them, each slightly different...

I basically followed Lilla's instructions, but I didn't make a hole in the centre of my flowers, as I wasn't going to add stamens. I just gathered the layers up in a small circle in the centre and tied off the threads.

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Here's how they look after singeing the edges carefully in a naked flame...

I added safety pins to the reverse, held in place with glue on the back of a small scrap of velvet.

I glued a velvet millinery leaf to each flower too.

Then the piece-de-resistance, to bring them into Maggie's style, I gave them all faces!

I'd been saving these original old paper scraps for a project and I felt they'd be appreciated by Maggie.

So cute!

To finish, I covered a piece of card with a sheet of rose printed wrapping paper...

And then pinned the three flower brooches to the front for an original Birthday card.

Then for her gift...I bought this lovely old cottage print from a friend recently - As you can see, it had lost its clips which hold the glass in place.

To fix the problem I took lengths of vintage velvet ribbon and glued them along the outer edges of the wooden frame. I overlapped the ribbon onto the front of the glass, gluing in place. At first I wasn't sure if the ribbon would hold the glass in place once it was hung up...

But once dry, it seemed to be quite strong and up to the job!

Hope she likes her pressie!

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I used some more of the vintage velvet to cover the top of this old wooden hat stand. The wood had split and so needed a disguise.

I trimmed the edge with a pretty flower braid.

I shall be taking this with me to the Dairy House Costume/Textile event on Sunday 15th, as well as lots of other antique and vintage treasures.

Finally, my thanks to Judy, for adding some of my ideas with vintage wallpaper to her blog here.

Niki x