Drought Resistant Gardening

Not really an issue around here at the moment but still...
Inspired by several Pinterest posts, I made a little succulent garden.

I mixed and matched a couple of projects I found on there. I made the green succulent  at the right from individual oval shaped leaves, roughly following this tutorial except that I hand cut the oval shapes, and stitched them together rather than hot gluing them..
Why on earth wouldn't you sew these together? By the time I've found the glue gun in the garage, remembered where the spare glue sticks are, left it to warm up and burned my fingers twice I could have sewn half a dozen of them.

As an aside, I don't understand the need to make everything "no-sew", especially with felt. Once many many many years ago I lovingly followed the instructions on Blue Peter to make a "lovely felt sunflower pincushion for Mother's Day". It involved gluing a stuffed felt centre and petals onto an old sticking plaster reel. It took me ages. And used a veritable lake of glue to get the felt to stick to the metal reel, or indeed itself.  
It did, in fairness, look lovely (or at least it did to my juvenile eye), but the glue had left the felt so stiff and hard that it was impossible to stick any pins in it, I was devastated.
I decided then and there that glue and felt do not mix, and I've never seen any reason to change that view

The bluish one at the back was made by rolling and pleating a long strip of  spiky leaf shapes in a similar manner to this tutorial. Again stitched not glued.

The glaucous looking one with the two little offshoots at the front left I kind of made up my own method for, and actually I think it's the one I like best.
The "pebbles" are just some wool felted balls I had lying around

June's Gifted Gorgeousness

It's time for June's Gifted Gorgeousness post, as organised by Jo from Serendipitous Stitching, where we show our gifted related stitching and crafting.

This month I'm sharing a travel pouch I've made for Naomi. 

The fabrics are from the "vacation" range by Makower. I made this pouch same way as the ones in this post, following the tutorial from SewCanShe, with the following slight alterations. I put it together with the short edge as the bottom rather than the long edge, made it a little over an inch bigger in each direction than in the instructions in order to fit a passport into it, but used the same size zip as given (extended with a strip of fabric). This means that it doesn't unzip right to the very bottom, which I thought would be more secure.

I also changed the configuration of the inside pockets (very hard to hold it open and take a picture of the inside at the same time by the way!)

It is meant to have a matching wrist strap attached by a carbine clip, but I'm waiting for the ribbon clamps to come so I'll have to add that later

Better Late Than Never

Two finishes!
The March and April Monthly Ornament Challenges from Needlecraft Haven (don't ask about the May Challenge, I'm thinking I'll skip it and move right on to June)
The March Challenge was from Sub Rosa here.
As always, I re-worked the little Cardinal birds to make them into robins. I wanted a simple finish for this one and planned just to hem-stitch the linen all around. Yes, well... I cut the fabric too close by mistake and my simple finish turned out to be anything but. It's taken me ages.
The idea is to tie it around a fat church candle at Christmas, but I don't have any of those to hand, so here it is tied around a Cornishware jug instead.

The April Challenge was from Romy's Cross Stitch here.
I don't know about you, but normally I start by choosing my thread colours, then pick the fabric that works best, and finally choose the trimmings when the stitching is finished. This one I went about completely backwards, by knowing which trimmings I wanted to use, namely two funky coloured jingle bells that came attached to a re-usable Christmas bubble bar/wand from Lush.
The result is definitely not what you would describe as being traditional Christmas colours, but I think it's rather fun.