What we've been up to - Instagram Version!

For those of you that don't follow us on Instagram, here's a preview of our latest pictures showing what we've been up to.

If you don't have a smart phone then you can still look at our photos from your computer as Instragram have now launched on the web too - Have a peek here

If you do have the Instagram app and want to follow us, our username is @twobirdscraft

Tutorial Tuesday: Jewellery for beginners - Earrings

When we first got into jewellery making the web wasn't as full as it is now with helpful resources for craft lovers, and we ended up buying a rather expensive kit with a DVD.

The kit was very informative and was a great starter set, but now everyone has to watch their pennies a bit more, it would be far too much of a luxury.

So, here at Two Bird's Craft we thought we'd start making our own jewellery tutorials!

We will start you at the very beginning for those of you with no previous experience.

Today's jewellery tutorial is for a pair of simple earrings, at the bottom of the page we will list some links for you to find some supplies if you need them.

Earrings are one of the first things we made and are definitely the easiest and quickest item of jewellery to make, so let's start:

To make the earrings you will need:

Two headpins in the metal of your choice

Two earring hooks.

Beads or charms to make your earrings pretty!

Pliers - round and flat nosed and

Wire cutters.

Pliers and wire cutters are essential kit!

Thread your bead selection

Step 1:  Thread your beads onto your headpin

Cut the headpin leaving 1cm space

Step 2:  With your wire cutters, cut the headpin one 1cm away from your top bead

Step3:  Next, get your round nosed pliers and grab the headpin a mm or two above your top bead and bend the wire 90 degrees.

Use the round nosed pliers

Bend 90 Degrees at top of beads

Step 4:  Still using your round nosed pliers, use the fattest bit of the plier you can whilst stilling getting a grip on the wire and from the top twist the wire into a loop.

Make a loop

Step 5:  Now, get your earring hook and your flat and round nosed pliers.

Hold the small hook on your earring hook with your flat pliers and then open it with the round nosed ones. Then hook your headpin by the loop you created onto your earring hook. Now you just need to close the hook the same way you opened it and...voila, an earring!

Connect to your earring hook

Now you need to do that all again to make a pair!

You can you any amount of beads and charms as you like, but we recommend putting a small bead or a sead bead at the bottom of your headpin (especially if they are flat bottomed ones), so that any big beads don't fall straight off! If you're feeling adventurous, you might even want to hook a few headpins full of beads onto your earring hooks! 

We've been experimenting with mixing crochet and jewellery making together, here's one of our teeny crochet flowers looped onto the earring hook - what do you think?

Here's one we made earlier!

We hope everything in the above tutorial makes sense and you all enjoy making your earrings! If you need any help or think any pictures/instructions need improving then please get in touch!

As promised, here are some suggested websites for supplies:

Pur-ple

EP Beads

Perfect Beads

Good sellers on eBay:

0kittypink0

BeadAddicts

Make and Tell Monday - Bracelets, Purses and more...

Hello everyone,

Well, last week didn't go entirely according to plan. We have both been a bit lazy on the production front and to make matters worse we had illness in the nest, plus a lack of jewellery supplies which we were expecting to arrive. All in all, a pretty rubbish start to this post, which should be where we tell you all about our new creations!

Looking back at last Monday, we outlined our plans to work on several items based on the experimentation we had done the week before. As far as this goes, the little heart we showed you now has a big brother made with DK 100% cotton which we are LOVING at the moment! (More on this yarn on Wednesday) However, the heart operation (groan!) has been… wait for it… Bypassed… ahem, as we found a great pattern for little crochet flowers and have spent nearly all our time making these instead!

The little flowers we have been making are in readiness for a line of jewellery we want to create, subject to the arrival of our belated supplies so hopefully we will have more to show you on these later in the week. We put together a prototype for your comments shown here, but it is unfinished as we have no clasps at the moment. Flower hair clips are another idea we want to try too.

The Jubilee coasters have been similarly pushed aside but we need to crack on with these this week or there will really be no point at all! 

In addition to these we had a great idea for mini bunting necklaces which may just make it into our Etsy shop for the weekend in question but the way things have been going recently one really can't tell!

So this week we have been blocking up the pipeline with even more ideas and experiments. We promise we will behave ourselves and start stocking our Etsy shelves soon though!

Now for the finale. The pink bird's niece and nephew are coming to stay in the Summer so she thought she should get a move on and start making them some goodies! Here is the first. This little fella is an owl purse based on a circle which we adapted after lots of tries with other patterns. the top opening is pretty narrow but it is for the niece who is only three so it will be perfect for her little paws! To give you an idea of scale it is about 15cm wide and the strap is 45cm long so she can wear it over her shoulder just like mummy! 

 

We hope she likes it and would love your comments too. A photo went onto Instagram earlier and it got lots of likes. If you think we should make some for our shop let us know. We are still finding our feet with the Etsy shop so any free market research would be appreciated!

So we have not been completely idle this week but have a lot of work still to do! Once again, let us know if you would like us to try any particular ideas out or just send us your comments on what we have put together so far.

Lots of love,

TBC x

Freebie Friday: 10% off all purchases in the TBC shop!

As promised last week, we'll be giving something away free each and every Friday!

To celebrate it being the best day of the week, we're giving a 10% discount on all orders placed in our Etsy shop today.
http://www.etsy.com/shop/twobirdscraft

To claim your discount add your item(s) to the basket, click checkout and then enter coupon code FREEBIEFRIDAY1805



Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend, we'd love to hear what you get up to, whether it be craft related or otherwise!

Contact us:
e-mail: twobirdscraft@gmail.com
twitter: www.twitter.com/twobirdscraft
facebook: www.facebook.com/twobirdscraft

Tutorial Tuesday: Crochet Flowers and more!

One of the first books we bought when learning to crochet was Cute and Easy Crochet by Nicki Trench.

The book is wonderfully laid out and easy to read and understand. The crochet terms, hook sizes and wool names are all UK terminology.

We have both made several things from the book but one of our favourites has been the crochet flowers.

These are easy to make and really add an extra something to whatever you're making. - We have used them for adornments to things like purses and gadget cases, and even made a pretty flower garland!

Here's the pattern to make these lovely little flowers, it's really quick and we've found you can use whatever wool and hook size you like - it will just mean you make different size flower!!

• Using your first colour for the inner of the flower, chain 6 then join with a slip stitch in the first chain to make a circle.
• Make 16 double crochet into the circle. Join with a slip stitch and fasten off.
• Join second colour for outer part of flower into fastened off stitch.
• *Chain 3, make 1 treble into next two stitches, chain 3, slip stitch into next stitch, repeat from * 4 more times  - this makes 5 petals.
• Pull tail to close up centre hole and sew in ends.

See, easy peasy! 

One of our favourite crochet bloggers, Lucy from Attic 24, has also written a post about a pattern in this book, you can read about that here - she, like us, can't sing this book's praises highly enough.

To end the post, here's a picture of one of our creations from the book which was easy but also very satisfying to make - a lovely crochet purse with the pretty flowers we mentioned already. 

Happy hooking!

TBC xxx

Make and Tell Monday

What we have been making this week...

Hello everyone, 

Hopefully you all had a great weekend and are fully charged ready for the new week ahead. If you need just one more hit of something pretty to stand you in good stead, take a look at the two birds creations of the last week.

In the experimental stages we are looking at little stuffed hearts. The self striping colours on this worked really well we think! We will be looking at ways to use these and other colour combinations and finishes this week.

 

Also in the works are Jubilee coaster sets! We started out with solid colours to test the pattern and then stumbled across this amazing striped jubilee wool! Please comment and let us know if  you think we should have a set of four striped coasters, or a set with one of each solid colour and a fourth striped one. We can't decide… Perhaps we will try both!

Something we were trying out a few weeks back was the tiny crocheted owls. We now have a complete rainbow of the little creatures all ready to adorn your keys! Each owl is made with 100% cotton and decorated with a patterned cotton tummy and cute, button eyes! They all turn out just a little differently and have developed unique personalities!

Our little rainbow owls are available for purchase in our Etsy shop right now so take a look! If you would like a particular colour which has sold out please email us direct and we would be happy to commission another for you.

We have lots more ideas queued up but if you have anything you would like us to have a try at making for you please email your suggestions.

Lots of love,

TBC x