Springing forward

I worked on a special project while I dreamed of Spring: it's a banner designed by Charlotte Lyons.  I bought it here, from her Etsy shop.

sampler by Charlotte Lyons

It was so much fun to have a project to embroider in spare moments over the last few months.  The little birds are so simple and so cheerful!

When I finally finished, I cut out slightly larger pieces of different fabrics -- one cotton and two kinds of burlap, fine and coarse -- and sewed the little birds onto them.

Although Charlotte's design came with six pennants, I used just five of them for my banner.  I always like to work with odd numbers.

Then, I sewed a transparent pink fabric with a floral print as the back of each pennant, and linked them all together with a length of vintage lime-y green trim I've had for a long time.

The final step was to hand sew tiny crochet doilies as an accent to the pennants.

I'm sorry but I'm never very successful with photographing my banners -- even so, here's my attempt at showing you the whole thing (above.)

Isn't it just sweet and fun?  Doesn't it just sing "Spring"?  I made it as a gift for Jeanelle; she has two lovely little daughters and a son, and I thought the girls especially (including mom!) would really enjoy it.

I packaged it in a wax paper bag that I embellished like so:

I don't know about your neck of the woods, but it's not feeling much like traditional Spring around here this weekend -- but a girl can dream!

By the way -- have you seen this photo floating around online?  Particularly on pinterest?

I have; it's a way to make your refrigerator rolls look like bunny rabbits.  Now, why didn't I ever think of that before?

Well, I'm here to tell ya -- I tried it the other night and it is not as easy as it looks to get perfectly-shaped bunny rabbits.  Mine sort of looked like mutant bunnies (see above.)  Also, when the ears stick out like that, I found they cooked more quickly than the rest of the bunny and burned.  So much for cute!