Fancy Full Vintage // Wonder Hill Market

 

We are super excited to share that Fancy Full will be setting up stall at the next Wonder Hill Handmade and Vintage Market on Saturday 28th September at Tooting Tram and Social.

We will be selling vintage clothing and handmade crafts from our very talented family members. In the run up, we'll be sharing sneak previews of the tresaures that can be found on our stall.

Hope to see lots of lovely faces whilst we're there!

xxx

Macrame hanging planters

For those of you who don't know, which won't be many as I bemoan this to just about anyone I meet,  I live in the teeniest of little studio flats with my boyfriend. Sadly unlike Lucy I do not have the luxury of a dressing room or even a wardrobe of my own (I share mine with Ed, so hard!!). So anything which is space saving is a dream come true for me.

Since moving to London I've really missed having a garden and being able to grow things. I've been successfully keeping alive a basil plant from Tesco for a few months now and it got me feeling confident and wanting more. We really lack surface spaces where plants can sit and I find they tended to look a bit messy, so I hunted around on Pinterest for hanging planters and found this little tutorial. I won't rehash it here as I couldn't explain it half as well, but basically I followed it and was pretty pleased with the results.

I just used some cheap string I found in Tiger, the tutorial recommends using a thin rope but that just seemed a bit pricey for me and I had this string hanging around doing nothing. I used these sticky hooks on the ceiling so I didn't need to put a hole in the ceiling (we're renting and I'm pretty sure that's frowned upon). Just make sure you check the weight of your plant and how much the hooks will hold, I used two hooks for each plant just to be safe.

I even started to get confident and come up with my own variations on the original tutorial, it really is very very easy to do Macrame!! If you can tie a knot you're going to be just fine. One top tip I did work out is that it is a lot easier to do if you have some way of anchoring your strings together so you can keep your tension even, like when you used to make friendship bracelets and asked your friend to hold the ends for you. I worked out that a bulldog clip attached to my duvet worked pretty well for me and meant I could lie around in bed whilst making these, win!

I have now added a mint plant and a pretty succulent with pink flowers to the collection and am feeling very happy!

Nicci

xx

Year of 26 - Update

I mentioned here that I had set 6 goals for my year of being 26. One of the things on the list was to make a dress or item of clothing, before I attempt a vintage pattern, which no doubt will be really complicated (to me) I have decided to practice on a few 'test' garments. The first being, this simple enough looking top.

It says that it's a 1 hour easy pattern but no doubt I will end up with pins in my fingers and only one armhole!

I bought the pattern from Habithat, which has a really big selection of patterns and I will probably re-visit to buy some more patterns to build my skills up! I really want to make this 1930s Summer Suit once I've got a bit more confidence!


I'll post a few pics of the process and hopefully some sort top at the end!


Wish me luck!

xxx

Party Box

We went to surprise Freya in Leeds last weekend as she has just moved into her new house and we are super nosey people! I have to say surprising Frey was the most fun I'd had in ages, we roped in Mattie and Elaine (Mama Hirst) into our schemes and they did excellently, making fake plans to ensure we could snare her. 

We decided to make what became known as the Party Box as a house warming present, it was basically a box full of the ingredients to make the tastiest mojitos. 

So the party box was essentially a pimped up shoe box! We covered it in brown paper and decorated with various vintage ribbons and the word 'party' in washi tape. We decorated all the jam jars with ribbons, gave the bottles a little bow tie and drew an amusing face on one of the limes.

And here we are super proud of all the crafting! 

We based our mojiots on this recipe but we didn't have sugar syrup so just used soft brown sugar, we also added raspberries into the cocktail and they were super tasty.

My new obsession

This christmas my lovely mama taught me how to knit. She has patiently attempted this in the past on a few occasions but I always gave up too soon in frustration, but this year I was determined! My sister bought me some lovely soft wool and bamboo knitting needles and as serendipity would have it there was a knitting pattern for a scarf featured in Company magazine this month which looked lovely so I gave it a go...

Image source

This pattern was in the January edition of Company magazine and I did have to alter it a little bit as the instructions to make the rib knit at either end of the scarf were a little bit wrong, but luckily mama Robbo knew what she was doing and it was all good. My sister gave me some size 7 bamboo needles for christmas with some lovely cream chunky wool so I adapted the pattern to fit my materials and had to cast on 28 stitches to make it wide enough instead of the recommended 14. It isn't as chunky or loose looking as the one in the magazine, but I'm super proud of it anyway!

So this is the beginning of my first ever item of knitting, and yes those are my PJ's and socks, this was during the Christmas holidays after all and PJ's are mandatory at all times unless you absolutely have to get dressed to go outside! At least I had the decency to hide the remains of selection boxes from view...

Here we are a few days down the line and the scarf is really starting to take shape now, plus I am out of my PJ's. What I liked best about this pattern was that doing it in the moss stitch kept things interesting and it feels so squishy and soft! I only had two balls of wool in my stash and the shop had sold out of the rest of that batch of wool so my scarf came out a little shorter than I might have liked, but it's still fine to bundle under a coat...

Ta-dah!! The finished product, all fluffy and warm and woolly. This took me from Christmas day til about the 2nd Jan to complete, which really surprised me. My mum was found craftily knitting away at it on a few mornings when she thought I wasn't looking, but I think I did the majority of it! The nicest part about this Christmas present was that mama has now rediscovered her long lost love for knitting and has joined a group, and it's now also a shared passion for us.

Nicci
xx

Advent Calendar

I decided to make an advent calendar for this festive period out of some vintage fabric I bought from ebay.
Unfortunately I didn't manage to take any pics of the process but I'll try my best to explain how I did it.

Step 1: I drew 5 different festive shapes, I plumped for stoking, star, present, heart and tree. Cut them out of the fabric and cut two shapes for each day.
Step 2: I added some ribbon on the front of the present shape so that it didn't just look like a box!
Step 3: Sew the two shapes together to make a pouch, allowing for an opening big enough for your selected chocolates.
Step 4: Fill with chocolate (obviously the best bit!) I used a mixture of chocolate coins, santas and lindt bears.
Step 5: I tied some string round the front of our kitchen table and then pegged the shapes on.

And hey presto......Advent Calendar!

Festive Greetings
Lucy xxx