With Mother’s Day looming how many people have forgotten to order their gifts in time for them to be delivered before Mother’s Day? I always do this whether it’s for birthdays, anniversaries, weddings etc. and I end up rushing to the shops and getting something that isn’t exactly what I wanted. So if that is you today then I thought I would do a quick round up of some of lovely, quick make at home gifts that would put a smile on any mum’s face.
First up is this sweet Crocheted Daffodil from Simply Crochet.
You could crochet up a few of them to make a bunch or add a brooch pin on the back to make a cute brooch. What mum wouldn’t be delighted with that!
Next up is a bouquet of Map Roses from Pillar Box Blue.
If you don’t have any old maps these would look just as good on pages from an old book or on scrapbooking papers.
Or what about Mother’s Day in a Jar from Hello Splendid.
What a great way to pamper your mum, giving her lots of her favourite little treats in a pretty jar that she can use as storage afterwards.
If your mum likes to sew how about making this cute little Teacup Pincushion from Pins and Needles.
You could use some fabric from a favourite old blouse or dress, or from clothes that the grand-kids have grown out of to make this gift extra special.
Lastly, if you like to bake how about making this yummy Rose and Dark Chocolate Shortbread from Waitrose.
Add some pretty packaging to make a gorgeous handmade gift.
There are loads more fabulous ideas on Pinterest for quick and easy Mother’s Day gifts to make, but I warn you that you may end up spending so much time looking at all the great ideas that you don’t actually get the time to make anything (I speak from experience here lol).
Finally, with Easter just around the corner I thought I would make a cute Easter themed freebie for you. I love to add to my seasonal decor with printables because they are such a quick way to change things up a bit. Please remember that our Easter printable is Free for Personal Use only.
The printable will fit in an A4 frame and you can download it here.
If you like our printable please Pin it and if you use it we’d love to know.
Why not follow us on Facebook or Instagram too we would love to see you there 🙂
Happy Mother’s Day to all the mums out there.
Category: Freebies
Spotty Dottie font goes global
We are so excited to be able to tell you that our Spotty Dottie font is now available on dafont.com. Spotty Dottie is available free for Personal Use. If you are interested in our Commercial Licence please email us for details.
Free Autumn printable
I just love the colours of Autumn – the reds, browns, greens, golds and oranges that seem to speak of cosiness and warmth and evenings indoors wrapped up on the sofa. I love the crisp cooler air that means it’s time to put on a sweater and get out the wool to knit or crochet a new scarf and hat. I love the crunching sound of leaves under my feet and sitting in front of the fire at night with a crocheted blanket on my lap and lots of candles dancing on the walls around the room. I love how my cooking changes as the days get cooler and the salads and barbecues of summer change to soups, stews and hearty casseroles to warm and nourish. I love getting out my recipe books and planning crumbles, pies and delicious treats to make use of all the amazing fruits of the season. I have many happy memories of coming home from school to be met with the smell of freshly baked apple pies and scones just out of the oven. In Autumn more than other seasons I find that the smell and taste of food evoke childhood memories.
At this time of year, I love to decorate the house with a few bits and bobs that bring the Autumn indoors. I try to find a new piece to add to the collection each year, this year it was some silk leaves in fabulous Autumn shades. I also made an Autumn themed printable to frame and put on the table in the hallway. I was so pleased with it that I thought it would be a nice freebie to giveaway so you can download it from the link at the bottom. It is designed to be A4 size but I trimmed mine to fit an 8 x 10 frame as I found a lovely red frame hidden away in a cupboard that I had put away ‘somewhere safe’ and forgot about.
Our Autumn wordart printable is Free for Personal Use only.
You can download it HERE.
We hope you like it and can use it in your home, we’d love to see a picture if you do.
Leave a comment if you have an idea for a free printable you would like to see on our blog and don’t forget to follow us for updates.
Stripe-It updated
Just a quick update to let you all know that the three new Stylecraft Special DK colours – Lapis, Lincoln and Blush – have now been added to Stripe-It. If you haven’t heard of Stripe-It yet, it is a random stripe creator for those of us who have difficulty in doing ‘random’ colour patterns. At the moment it is based on the Stylecraft Special DK colours as this is what we most often use at RecklessHen HQ, but you can just ignore the colour names and use it for any yarn brand as well. Further colour charts will be added over time.
We have added a quick link to Stripe-It over on the right so you don’t have to scroll through posts to find the link. If you do use Stripe-It we would love to hear from you so leave us a comment.
Have a great weekend.
September desktop freebie
Can you believe that summer is over and schools have started back already? I don’t know how summer flew by so quickly and I didn’t get to do half the things I had planned. Oh well, that’s life I suppose, at least it is in my house! Maybe you are more organised than me, I always have lots of plans and ideas and then things come up and things get moved about and changed a bit and chaos reigns. Even though I didn’t do all the things on my list I had a lovely summer. I spent time with family and friends, I took some online courses, I decorated, I did some pottery painting and some papercraft, I chilled out a bit, and I did lots and lots of crocheting. I even managed to read a book! I also designed an app which hubby is programming and I am soooo excited about that. There will be lots more news on that in the next few weeks.
I didn’t take as many photos as I usually do this year, perhaps because my teens and twenties are no longer co-operative in having their picture taken. One mention of Facebook or Instagram and they disappear from sight. Anyway, these are some of my favourite photos from summer 2017 (or at least the ones the kids allow me to share).
So now it is back to the routine of school runs, clubs, sports etc and before we know it Christmas will be just around the corner. I don’t mind that at all as it’s my favourite time of year. I’m a bit Christmas obsessed and even watched a Christmas movie (OK I admit it was more than one) over summer. But I shouldn’t get ahead of myself and miss out all the lovely things about Autumn – the wrapping up in scarves and sweaters to keep out the chill in the air, the crispy leaves under our feet when we go for a stroll, the fabulous colours as the greens turn to orange, red, gold and brown and of course the hot chocolate in front of the fire with the candles lit.
And what better way to start a new month and a new season than by getting our 200th ‘liker’ on Facebook. To celebrate we are giving away a September desktop.
RecklessHen September Desktop 1024×768
RecklessHen September Desktop 1280×1024
RecklessHen September Desktop 1600×1200
I hope this is some use to you, feel free to share it and pin it. We would love it if you followed our blog, Facebook page or Instagram (or better still all of them ) and we love to get your comments and feedback.
How did you spend your summer?
Playing with Fonts (and a freebie)
So this week I have been playing around with creating my own fonts. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while but didn’t know where to start. Thanks to a fab course I did on Skillshare I was able to give it a go. So armed with my ipad Pro and my apple pencil I got stuck in and had so much fun. My first two creations were OK but need more work so I will come back to them another day and tidy them up for sharing, but my next two fonts were much better and I am really pleased with them. They aren’t professional by any means but I think they are fun and kinda quirky. The first one I call Spotty Dottie. When I am writing signs and posters I often do letters like this with dots on the ends so I thought it would be fun to turn it into a font and it would save me alot of time.
The second one I call For the Love of Zebras for no reason other than it has stripes in the capitals and it made me think of zebras.
If you would like a copy of either of these the links are below and they are free for personal use, feel free to pin and share. If you use them I’d love you to leave me a comment. If you have ever thought of creating your own fonts I definitely think you should go for it. They may not be perfect but you will enjoy the process and learn loads.
Spotty Dottie ttf
For the Love of Zebras ttf
A girl with a plan(ner)
I spent last week tearing my hair out trying to get to grips with my Silhouette Cameo cutting machine. I got it for my birthday last year because I really wanted to make my own planner stickers, but it has been sitting forlornly in its box on a shelf ever since. Things keep coming up and I just haven’t got round to learning how to use it yet and I was finding it really frustrating. So last Monday I decided that this was the day that I would master the Silhouette Cameo. I thought that in a few hours I would be printing and cutting lots of lovely new stickers to go in my Erin Condren Life Planner. Boy was I wrong! I connected up the machine and linked it to my computer via Bluetooth (see how techie I am lol) with no problems. I got the software running and started to design my first set of stickers and that is where it all went wrong. I am used to using Photoshop and Photoshop Elements but this software was just not doing what I wanted it to do at all. After many, many hours and more than a little name calling, I finally had a page of stickers. I printed them out on my computer and they looked fine but when I put them through the Cameo the cut lines were going through the middle of the stickers. I checked on the screen again, everything looked fine, I could see the cut lines and they were not in the wrong place so I printed them out and tried again, and again, and again (I’m sure you are getting the picture). By this stage I was extremely stressed, more tense than the most tightly coiled spring on earth, and more than a little bad tempered. I’m sure if you asked my hubby or kids they would agree wholeheartedly. I finally worked out that the problem was that the registration marks you have to set were ever so slightly out and it was completely ruining my stickers, sheet after sheet after sheet of sticker paper was going in the bin. Eventually, on Friday, my son appeared and within no time at all he had sorted it out. So five days of temper tantrums and stress later and I can now print and cut my own stickers. Yay go me 🙂
My first sticker sheet is very simple, nothing fancy, but I thought I would give it away as a freebie anyway. You can print the PDF file on to an A4 sticker sheet and cut the stickers out with scissors, or you can just print on to A4 copier paper and then cut out and glue the stickers in to your planner. If you have a Silhouette Cameo you may even be able to import the pdf and print and cut it but I have no idea how to do that yet. Any advice on using the Cameo would be very, very gratefully received.
Now that I have got the hang of basic rectangular stickers I will move on to other shapes and see how I get on and hopefully I won’t be turning the air blue!
Cupcakes & Cocktails planner stickers PDF
A little crochet humour
I have been missing for a week or two as I have been planning a new venture and there don’t seem to be enough hours in the day for everything I want to get done with the result that I have neglected the blog and I am very frustrated with myself. I think I really need to plan my time better. Thank goodness for my Erin Condren Life Planner or who knows if anything would ever get done. On a positive note, I am really enjoying being part of the Makelight membership and learning and connecting with so many other amazingly creative people. Although I am way behind on the courses I get lots of inspiration from the photos and blog posts of other members and I am constantly in awe of their creativity and drive. It has definitely made me up my game when it comes to my Instagram photos which have really improved over the last three months. Here are a few of my favourites from May.
I’ve also been trying to keep up with my crocheting and I am on row 64 of my Attic24 Hydrangea blanket so I am three-quarters of the way through it and I LOVE it. I think this will definitely be my favourite blanket so far. Even though I know I shouldn’t start another project, I confess that I am doing the Vintage Sweethearts CAL in Crochet Now magazine. I am not using the wool recommended, instead I just matched the colours to my favourite Stylecraft Special DK colours and am using up some of my yarn stash. And as if two projects on the go aren’t enough I also got the beautiful Primavera blanket pattern by Debbie Bliss on Yarn Shop Day and have started that too.
Heather (the Hen from RecklessHen) has made up a pattern to use up her yarn stash and it is so gorgeous. She is calling it the Vintage Granny and once she finishes it she will write it up and we will put it on the blog. I know you will really love it. Here is a sneak peek.
And finally, as a wee treat, here is a free crochet humour printable to download. It is 6 x 4 so it goes in a standard frame. I printed mine out on glossy photo paper but inkjet paper would be just as good.
Clicker here to download.
What are you working on at the moment?
Hooked for you tags, free to good home
Good morning, what a lovely, sunny day it is here in Belfast. The weather has been fabulous for the last week and I am hoping it lasts for the rest of the month (and June, July & August too, but that is probably too much to wish for). Today I have a freebie for you. It is a cute set of gift tags for the crocheters among you. I was searching through some photos at the weekend and came across some crochet themed clipart I bought quite a while ago, planning to make stickers with it. I decided that I really need to be better at organising the files on my computer so I know where stuff is and it doesn’t get forgotten about and also that it was really time to put the clipart to good use. I have a few things I have crocheted to put away for birthday gifts so I thought it would be a good idea to make some tags to go with them. I had so much fun playing around with the graphics and trying to come up with suitable messages to go with them. I really need to do this kind of thing more often because I love working with graphics and designing things.
I came up with three different designs so I hope you will like at least one of them and be able to use it on your gorgeous handmade yarn goodies. I printed mine on normal A4 white card and then I just cut them out, punched a hole at the top and put some coloured yarn through to hang them from. I think I might have to go and make some matching stickers now and I can think of lots of ways to use the pretty images in my EC planner.
I found that printing the tags from the pdf reader built into Google Chrome gave better colours than using Adobe Acrobat Reader but that may just be my printer. The link to download the tags is below the images. Let me know what you think of them, I always love feedback.
Have a great day whatever you are doing.
Download your hooked for you tags here.
Random stripes dilemmas
I don’t know if you are like me, but I have real problems trying to come up with crochet patterns for blankets etc. that use random stripes of colour. I start off so well but after a few rows it quickly becomes obvious that I am creating a pattern and the colours are not random at all. I know that makes me a bit OCD and I’m OK with that but it doesn’t help me get my pattern created. So I asked my lovely computer whiz other half to come up with something to help me do random stripes and he has created a fab little program for me that I want to share with you all.
Since I mostly use Stylecraft Special DK in my blankets, STRIPE-IT (that’s what I’m calling it) is based on the Stylecraft Special DK colours, or at least quite a few of them. All you have to do is choose your colours, choose how many rows in each stripe and the total number of rows in your pattern and hey presto – random stripes. I am so happy with this program and he has promised he will do the same for other yarn colours and turn it into an app for me. I am going to get him to do the Scheepjes Colour Crafter next. If you would like to use my STRIPE-IT random stripe creator you can find it HERE If you like it follow my blog or facebook or Instagram for updates when new versions come out.