How To: Sew an Embroidered Felt Gingerbread House Ornament

A little house embroidery pattern + some ginger coloured felt = a sweet little gingerbread house to hang on your Christmas tree!

I shared a set of five free house embroidery patterns this spring, which I realised would be perfect for making little embroidered Christmas ornaments. They'd be sweet for any Christmas, but they feel particularly appropriate for this year of staying home!

To sew my ornament, I stretched a piece of ginger coloured felt in an embroidery hoop. I traced the house pattern onto a piece of white tissue paper with a ballpoint pen, adding 2020 to the roof and the house number 10 to the door to personalise the ornament (it's gonna be a gift for someone who doesn't read my blog!). I attached the tissue paper to the felt with large tacking stitches of sewing thread, then followed the lines to stitch the design.

I used white embroidery thread (floss) to represent lines of icing, using three of the six strands. I stitched most of the design in backstitch then added French knot berries to the little tree. 

I then removed the tacking stitches and carefully tore away the tissue paper, revealing the embroidered design. I carefully cut around the house leaving a border of felt around the edge. I then used the house shape to cut a second backing shape of felt, added a loop of narrow ribbon, and joined the layers together with blanket stitch. 

I lightly stuffed my ornament but flat houses also look great and would be ideal for popping inside a card to a friend this holiday season!

Click here to find the free little house embroidery patterns.

These patterns are for non commercial use only: you can use them to embroider as many houses as you want for yourself or as gifts, but please don't make any for sale. You may borrow a couple of photos if you want to blog about this project, but remember to credit me and link back to this page on my blog, and do not reproduce my entire  post or share my pattern on your site. Thanks!

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5 Little House Embroidery Patterns

Today I've got some more cute little houses for you to stitch!

A few days ago I shared a "Stay Home" embroidery pattern...

... and now I've got a whole village of little houses for you to sew.

Stitch one, like I have! Stitch them all in a row like a little street! Stitch the set and send them to your friends in lockdown! So many stitchy options!

You'll find the pattern sheets for all 5 houses at the bottom of this post.

These embroidery patterns would look cute framed in an embroidery hoop. You could also embroider them onto felt to make little house ornaments (like the owl ornament I stitched earlier this year), or sew them onto rectangles of fabric to use for making lavender sachets.

I adapted the patterns from a tutorial I designed a few years ago for making cute little felt houses. Follow the link for the templates and step-by-step instructions! They also make super cute felt gingerbread houses.

These patterns are for non commercial use only: you can use them to embroider as many houses as you want for yourself or as gifts, but please don't make any for sale. You may borrow a couple of photos if you want to blog about this project, but remember to credit me and link back to this page on my blog, and do not reproduce my entire  post or share my pattern on your site. Thanks!

Enjoyed these free patterns? Buy me a "coffee" and help support my blog!


P.S. Subscribe to my newsletter for a monthly free pattern and visit my crafty tutorial archive for lots more free projects.

Visit my shop to buy my printable PDF sewing patterns:

Follow the links to open each pattern sheet in a new window, make sure you're viewing it full size then print it at 100%.

Little houses embroidery patterns sheet 1.

Litte houses embroidery patterns, sheet 2.

My Flat in Progress, September 2018: Putting up Pictures

After hanging the first few pictures in my flat this summer (in the hallway), we finally got around to hanging a few more this autumn.

First up: adding a bit of gentle colour to my very minimal spare bedroom.

I am truly terrible at interiors blogging, because not only have I not taken any more photos of these pictures in situ (so you can better see how they look in the room as a whole) I've also not taken any close-up pics so you can actually, you know, see what the pictures themselves look like. Tsk tsk.

Here's an earlier photo of this wall looking very empty and boring. (If you're curious, you can see more pics of my spare room here).

The group over the radiator are six prints by Geninne D. Zlatkis from her collage birds series, which I bought way back in 2008 but still really like. Everyone who visits my flat seems to love them, too - I've actually had a few people tell my off for hanging them in my spare room! (Here are some old snaps of them in the kitchen/diner in my old flat in 2009, aren't they darling?).

After years of only having art up in cheap clip frames and then several more years of having all my pictures packed up in boxes while I was living with my parents, it feels BEYOND AMAZING getting things up on the wall in actual proper picture frames.

I keep changing my mind about what I'm going to hang where, though! The other picture in the spare room - a print of this wonderful illustration by Lauren Nassef (of pottery collector Edward Sylvester Morse) - I was convinced had to be hung in my living room, because I love it so much that I wanted to be able to look at it a lot instead of hiding it away in the spare room (especially as this was going to be the first time I'd ever actually had space to hang it up on a wall somewhere, after almost ten years of owning it). But once we'd hung up the birds, my dad suggested the pottery collector print would look good in the remaining space and it looked perfect... so up it went.

We made the mistake of hanging it centred in the gap between the end of the radiator and the wardrobe instead of centred between the bird pictures and the wardrobe, but it still looks okay enough that I'm happy to leave it as it is - especially as the wardrobe probably isn't going to be a permanent feature in this room, so I may have to re-hang this picture in the future anyway once I get the "final" bit of furniture for this space. Despite this niggle, I'm really happy with how these seven pictures look in the spare room and I've loved looking at them during the past few months while the spare room has been my bedroom!

In September we also put up the first few pictures in the lounge (we'd hung up my office noticeboard in the summer which has a lot of postcards etc pinned on it, but no actual framed art). On the left hand side of the chimney breast, we hung a couple of posters by Sharilyn Wright of lovelydesign: Beautiful Conifers of Canada and Beautiful Leaves of Canada.
 

These posters are another purchase from almost ten years ago (I bought a lot of art in 2008/9!) which have never been up on the wall before so, again, I am thrilled to finally have them on display. I continue to be a terrible interiors blogger with these rubbish photos, but you can get a better look at everything on those shelves here if you're curious. (I've had to shuffle some things around in the "office" end of my living room to find a new home for the little wooden drawers which previously sat on these shelves, because keeping them here would have meant the prints hanging above them would have been ridiculously high up the wall. Like my decisions about where to hang pictures, working out where all my stuff is gonna live in this flat is a slowly evolving process!)

I still need to properly mount the posters as I only just got round to getting custom mounts to perfectly fit them, but it's still fantastic having them up on the wall even if they are hanging a little wonkily right now.

On the other side of the chimney breast are a set of four Royal Mail stamp posters, from the village Post Office my grandparents used to run.

For a closer look at these posters (& to see them in their old homes in my old flat many years ago) check out this post.

Like the bird prints (and all the other art I've owned for a long time), these posters always looked great but look soooo much nicer now I've got them in some Actual Real Proper Non-Clip Frames. I love the design of these four stamp posters, and they have a lot of sentimental meaning for me as they (obviously) remind me of my grandparents but also of my childhood love of stamp collecting (I still love a nice stamp). It's wonderful having them up on the wall together, in pride of place.

I'll take some better pictures of them all in situ sometime soon, I promise! In the meantime, here's the whole room as it looked back in September (complete with stylish furniture island full of stuff displaced by the work going on in the main bedroom).

We didn't do any other DIY in September, but I did get very excited about MIRRORS.

I spent ages trying to work out what picture I could hang in the empty space at the gloomiest end of my hallway, but everything looked truly terrible (you know, because of the gloom). Everyone always goes on about how great mirrors are for adding light to a dark space, so - even though I'm not really a fan of having mirrors as decorative items in my home - I decided to have a look for cheap mirrors online, found a highly bargainous round one that looked like it might work, cut out a paper template the right size to test it out and it looked kinda awesome, sooo...

... now I have a mirror in my hallway. Do I have a photo to show you of said mirror in my hallway? Of course not. (It does look great, though! All those "put a mirror in a dark corner" articles in interiors magazines were right all along!).

Full of mirror enthusiasm, I then ordered a much fancier round mirror to hang on the chimney breast in my living room. It was the perfect size for the space and I'd oohed over it a lot when I'd seen it on Instagram but sadly, in real life, the colour was too coppery / rose gold for my taste so it went back in the box and back to the shop.

Such a shame, but one successful mirror purchase and finally getting more art up on the walls still feels like good decorating progress!

I'll share some more updates (and hopefully some better pictures) sometime soon. In the meantime, click here to catch up with my home renovation progress so far.

Less 365

Last Christmas I set myself a challenge to give away 100 things in the run up to Christmas, to counterbalance all the consumption and excess of the season.

I had to find one thing in my house each day which I no longer used / liked / needed and then give it away (to local charity shops or to friends and neighbours). The giving felt great, but the decluttering felt even better! I was totally amazed by how many random things I'd been keeping that I no longer had any use for or real interest in (including the cookie cutters pictured above, which I'd bought many years before and never used).

As I wrote last year, "I will never ever ever be a minimalist. I like having a house full of colour and pattern and vintage treasures and sentimental trinkets and family heirlooms and things which just make me happy because they're beautiful. But I do want my posessions to earn their place in my home, and to have a house filled with wonderful things rather than clutter."

So, without blogging about it (because, honestly, I didn't know if I'd be able to manage it, especially after having just cleared out 100 things) I set myself the challenge in 2011 to do a "Less 365" project, getting rid of one thing a day for a whole year... and I just completed it yesterday afternoon!

I put a box in the spare room and started adding things to it one by one. I didn't completely stick to the "one thing a day" rule, but I kept a list of everything as I went along so I could keep track of my progress and so it wouldn't matter so much if I missed a few days here and there, I just made them up later. Sometimes my "one thing" for the day included lots of individual things (like a big pile of old magazines, or a china coffee set), sometimes they were big things, sometimes small, but the list just kept on getting longer...

Some things went to the charity shop, some things to friends and neighbours, others got recycled or just thrown away if they were really old or damaged. I could probably have sold lots of stuff on Ebay but to be honest selling on Ebay makes me really stressed, and I wanted that warm fuzzy feeling you get from taking bags of nice things to the local charity shop more than I wanted a bit of extra cash.

It's remarkably easy to pick out just one book you're not going to read again, one CD you never listen to, one sweater you never wear, your least favourite bit of crockery, and so on... and I've found that by sticking everything in a box out of sight for a few weeks, decision-making is a lot less stressful. Putting stuff in the box doesn't feel scary and final, when you empty the box when it gets full you'll probably have emotionally let go of most of the contents... and if you haven't you get a second chance to rescue something at the last minute if you've changed your mind, or you can just leave things in the box for a few months while you make a final decision.

I'm not going to lie to you, it does get trickier to choose things as the year goes on, but it makes you really look hard at all your "stuff" and be really honest with yourself about what you want to keep and use/display in your home, and why... and, of course, your space will be much less cluttered. I hugely recommend it! And even if you don't fancy the full "Less 365", you could just try it for January and see how you get on :)

Then and Now

I was going through some old photos and found this one of me as a baby (with my parents' old cat Skitty Kitty)...

... sitting on a duvet cover which is currently on the bed in my spare room, almost 30 years later!

(It's a bit hard to see as the photo is a bit overexposed but if you want a closer look you can click on the image to view it full size)

Happy Corners

Oh lovely homes on design blogs and in magazines, how stylish and perfect you are! And how depressing it is to compare you to my own humble little flat! (does anyone else feel like this when reading design blogs?)

However, I am determined to stop wishing my flat was design-blog-perfect (which, let's face it, it never will be) but instead to celebrate all the small things in it which make me happy. Here are a few corners making me smile at the moment...

Pictures on the walls next to where I work at the kitchen table:


Working in the kitchen is not very glamorous (piles of washing up = not inspiring!) but these pictures always make me happy.


(Let's not mention all the other prints I've had for years and still not got round to framing and/or deciding where to display them. Shhh...)

Much beloved bedroom drawers:


I fell in love with the chest of drawers on the right after seeing it in a charity shop near my old flat in Bristol (despite at the time living in a fully furnished flat with no room for extra furniture!). It fits perfectly under our very slopey ceilings, magically matches the giant wardrobe that was here when we moved in, and we managed to find the drawers on the left in a Gloucester charity shop on our first furniture shopping trip. Hurrah!

Atomic coat hooks:
Love these. They're usually hidden under more coats than that though!

A vintage corner:

I blogged about this corner last year when I "temporarily" hung up these curtains... naturally, they're still there. I thought the boyfriend would hate them but he (amazingly) said he quite liked them and they're so gorgeous I don't want to take them down just yet :)

Bunting on the spare bed:


I made the felt bunting for a tutorial and it ended up (totally by accident) being the perfect size to hang on the end of the spare bed. The rest of the spare room is usually a big mess, but the bed + bright blankets + bunting = lovely.

And one more - beloved vintage suitcases:


I love storing things in vintage suitcases, they're so much more fun than boring boxes.

The bright teal suitcase was a bargain charity shop find, and is currently full of fabric. The brown suitcase belonged to my grandmother and is full of things that need mending... it also doubles as a doorstop!


Now, I just need to remember how happy these corners make me and try not to worry about too much all the bits inbetween ... and all the housework which hasn't been done because I was too busy sewing ;)

P.S. apologies to anyone who got this post twice in their blog reader. Technology & I are having issues today!

The Truth

Being a crafty blogger involves lots of editing - deciding which projects to share, which works in progress to photograph, and carefully cropping shots of workspaces and domestic corners to be as interesting as possible (and to hide that pile of ironing in the corner!).

But today I present to you some unedited chaos...


Our lounge has gradually disappeared under a mountain of crafty debris this weekend as I've been working on about a dozen projects at once. As we actually might have to use that sofa and the coffee table at some point I think today's project might be tidying up!

Tidying Up

This week I've been doing lots of tidying - putting away lots of crafty mess, rearranging my supplies storage and tackling the madness that is our spare room.

Not exciting at all (sorry!) but it feels sooo good to get it all done!

(Image taken from a vintage book about how to be a good housewife given to me by my boyfriend for a laugh and cos he knew I'd adore the illustrations!)

Flowers for my wall

It's been lovely and sunny all this week, perfect for a leisurely afternoon stroll round the local charity shops. Yesterday's find: this lovely vintage print, for a bargainous £1.25.
No idea where I'm going to put it, but I just couldn't resist!

The Joys of Pattern

Following on from my crafty chores, last night I attended to all kinds of sewing "odd jobs": cutting out this pattern piece, sewing on those sequins, finishing this, starting that... including making a start on a batch of Lily of the Valley brooches:
I'm making a batch of 10, so that meant cutting out 60 of the little white flower shapes! Phew.

Then today I've been breaking my brain by doing my accounts. Ugh.
I actually quite like writing things down, adding things up, making charts, etc (I especially like a nice bar chart) but staring at the computer all day! Yich.

Even my eyes going a bit funny doesn't stop me from checking out my blog favourites though... At the moment I am totally addicted to the visual feast that is Print & Pattern, and it's got me thinking about all the bits of pattern in my life, my favourite patterned things and why I love them. So, I'm going to do a little mini series blogging about them: lots of little patterned corners of my life to cheer my blog up amidst all these dull admin-ish tasks I've been doing lately.

First up: the most awesome drawer liner from our blue 1960s breakfast bar (itself not a very stylish feature!). It's just one little drawer, and mostly buried under cutlery and coasters, but its geometric cheerfulness makes me smile every time. It has also made me a total convert to the idea of decorating the insides of things: so many of my bits of furniture could do with an internal makeover...PS my tree stump brooch got a sweet mention over at Rare Bird Finds yesterday, hurrah!

Orange Orange Orange (365 / 264)

I have orange on the brain!

I was trying to think of something orange I could make as a gift for a friend who loves bright colours, and I thought maybe an orange version of my poppies? So I dug out some appropriately zingy orange felt from my stash and liked it so much against the black that I'm now planning to make a whole set of them (and probably a hairband too, I think I have an orange elastic to match).

Then thinking about orange I had a small "eureka!" moment as I suddenly worked out that peach (of course! why didn't I think of it before?) was the ideal colour to pair with white in a new version of my cherry blossoms:
I'd been contemplating a white version for ages but couldn't think what to use as the second colour. Luckily, I have both soft peach felt and pretty peach seed beads so I got to do some instant gratification crafting. Unluckily, I picked the wrong colour thread to start with (far too orange) but the peach I used second (at the front of the photo) is spot on. Very satisfying.

Also fantastically satisfying: while I was internet-less, one of the chores I managed to get done was hanging some of my pictures. These are above our fridge and freezer in the kitchen (due to be repainted white over the summer). Many of these are from Etsy, and most have been sitting around framed for about 5 or 6 months while I tried to work out where best to put them - it's so great having them up on the wall at last! There's a random piece of paper stuck up there too as I'm testing out whether I want to hang an extra little picture in the cluster (I think I probably do). I can see these from my workspace (aka the kitchen table), they are cheering me up greatly :)

UPDATE: My poppy design is now available as a sewing pattern, and the cherry blossom pattern is coming soon! Visit my shop to see all my printable PDF patterns