Wednesday 8 June 2016

Royal Crowns For The Queen's Birthday Tea!

Raphael's school was making sure it marked the Queen's birthday this week by putting on a tea party for the children with a musical celebration for the parents to also enjoy. As always I had completely missed that the children had to make crowns for a crown parade that was also going to take place. It was a chance comment from another parent that drew my attention to the need to get creative. This was on Monday night and it needed to be done by Wednesday. In true Emily style, I then spent the whole of Monday night thinking I have nothing for Raph to get creative with as half term had wiped us out of the craft stores we had. I then thought about a crown we could use that we already had and was then reminded that I can make fabric crowns, I've done it before!!!

So that was it. I pulled out my template and used my original post on making crowns to make up some new ones.

It didn't take long as the original method came back to me and I whipped up a completed crown within an hour. I was thinking I would have to make 2, as once Etta saw Raph's she would want one, so I made hers first. Then knowing that Raph actually needed to be part of making his, I sewed all the inside seams and waited for him to get back from school to do the finishing running stitch around all the edges.

This was Raph's first time using my machine. We had to have a long talk about fingers and needles, but as I was going to be in control of the power it made it a lot easier.

After putting our seam around the crown, we then added the ribbons together, this was more fiddly for him as it was much shorter bursts of sewing and a lot more movement. However, we had two completed crowns ready to be decorated. Now, as sewing buttons is not something that brings me great joy I got some fabric glue specifically for adding beads etc.

This was just from the sewing dept. in Dunelm. I often worry that things like this don't work and I was expecting all the buttons to fall off on Wednesday morning just as we would be leaving the house. But this stuff is fantastic. A good blob with a button pressed on has taken amazingly well to this heavy cotton fabric. And the final look is fantastic.

Luckily the glue dries clear which is great as we were a bit messy: kids + glue = horrified mum face! They just look perfect though. The theme for school was also red, white and blue so I did just choose those colours but if you had buttons of dark pink and green shades they would look amazing, a real jewel encrusted crown.

What is fab about these crowns as well is that you can just put them in the dressing up box and they will last play after play.

The kids looked fab this morning when they got ready!