For the past month I have become rather obsessed with  Tilly and the Buttons . I signed up to her online workshop and cannot stop raving about how great it is! If you would like to sew a jersey top but are a bit wary of the material, get signed up! It is great! She also has a blog full of helpful tips and tricks as well as a collection of sewing patterns which I can't wait to try! If you are just setting out on your sewing journey and find all the jargon daunting, the patters bewildering and the skills required flabbergasting, I suggest  'Love at First Stitch'  by Tilly Walnes. I recently purchased the book to add to my collection. I love it! It is jam packed full of helpful information and is organised into projects, so you don't become overwhelmed. Already I have a list of great projects I want to create. Dressmaking projects from Tilly's website, book, online workshop and projects out of my new May Martin's Sewing Bible and British Sewing Bee book. Ye...

You've gotten half way through a project and suddenly your sewing machine has had enough of playing nice! What do you do?!?!?!  Panic?  Stress out?  List off a whole load of profanities?  Jump straight to Google?  Yep I did the lot! Over the Christmas period I enjoyed time to myself and spending quality time planning tops for presents and my own personal stash. Then as I was finishing off a top for my grandma, the sewing machine began to play up. Puckering, creating large thread messes on the underneath of the garment and making an awful racket. So I gave up. I went to good old google and searched for possible reasons why this happened, tried the thread tensions, unthreaded and rethreaded the machine...twice. Still no luck.  Now if you are like me and have been given a hand-me-down sewing machine, it is highly likely your instruction and cleaning manual is missing. Luckily mine did come with the original machine oil, but I have ...

At the beginning of the year, I set myself the goal of becoming fitter. Like so many people I'm realising just how busy and hectic life is without adding in trips to the gym and working up a sweat doing various different workout activities. As a solution to this problem, I dug out my old faithful Fitbit. I have a Fitbit Flex which is the basic wristband model. As far as I'm concerned it does everything I require: track my steps; allow me to input my food intake; monitor my water consumption; and track my sleep pattern. In the photograph below you will notice one shining light; this indicates roughly how many steps you've taken. Now this was taken at the beginning of the day, with my daily goal of 10,000 steps, one dot indicates 2000 steps taken. The reason I'm blogging about this today is not to give you the hard sell on a Fitbit or other step counting devices out on the market; and it most certainly isn't to make you go all calorie counting crazy. I simply ...

I have been a bad blogger! I haven't updated the blog quite as regularly as I had hoped So I thought I would start by giving you guys a brief update on whats been happening in my little world. I returned home after working abroad and took up dressmaking again. I also Set up a craft blog called Amy's Attic .                                               We added to our family. Meet Bella, the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. She likes long walks round the village, playing with other dogs but hates the rain and new people! She is rather antisocial when it comes to humans!                                       I enjoyed a wonderful day in a local Spa and Hotel with my friend. I would definitely recommend a spa day to anyone who hasn't tried one! So relaxing! ...

Christmas has been and gone and I spent it being creative as per usual. As well as making a top for my grandma, I set out to make crackers with a personal touch. They went down a treat. I got them from Hobbycraft. Now I could have released my teacher side and made them with toilet roll tubes and crepe paper but I wanted them to match our presents, which were wrapped in brown paper with pretty bows and ribbons, so I opted for a Christmas cracker kit. The cracker kit I used is no longer on the website, but here is a version of the kit . This kit comes with the cardboard cracker paper and attached snapper, paper joke/trivia and an assortment of colourful paper hats. All that is left to do is buy the gift for inside and put them all together. I loved shopping for the little gifts to go in the crackers. I bought miniature bottles of alcohol, little bottles of scented hand sanitiser from the Body Shop and little tubs of lip balm. One warning I will give to anyone planning on doing thes...

Happy New Year! So 2016 has begun and many of us have started our New Year's resolutions. Mine started a while back. I plan on sewing/crafting more, because everyone has their outlets that relaxes them, crafts are my outlet. Now we are going to flash back a few week ago *Imagine T.A.R.D.I.S sounds here*. A friend and I were spending the day being ladies of leisure at the local Spa and Hotel, I felt so posh, when I began discussing my recent creative projects. Well after a glass of champagne, pampering and the heat of the hot tub, my friend had said how she found it odd I hadn't started a blog, documenting my projects. Now in the weeks to follow this thought had lingered and after a New Years Bucket List discussion my friends set me the goal of setting up a blog, thus Amy's Attic was born! The inspiration for Amy's Attic began months ago when I got sick, or rather my mother got sick, of me using her dining room table as a sewing/craft space. I then ran an idea passed...