Ladder Love

I (Mrs Owl) have an addiction. Ok ok I have MANY addictions, doilies, owls, turkish delight chocolate, that little bit of froth in the bottom of the coffee cup, throw cushions, sarcasm (pretty sure that counts as an addiction) and many more but today... today's addiction is brought to you by the letter AWESOME and is all about these.....

The ever lovely never outdated wooden ladder! Infact I am SO in love we have a Pinterest board dedicated to them!


When I first met Mrs Elephant I told her of my ladder love (hey nothing to be ashamed of - ladder lovers unite!!) and how desperately I wanted one to put in my loungeroom  and she told me about this gorgeous wooden ladder her mum used to have. Her mum gave it to her (so much better than any other form of love!) and get this - when Elephant demolished her house SHE LEFT IT BEHIND!!!!  Like a little abandoned puppy, void of love, out in the cold. Her father-in-law went and got it (love a man with heart) then 6 years later when they moved THEY left it behind at their old house aswell!! What is with these people?? Ladders have feelings too!!  I was GUTTED!

Fast forward to a couple of months ago. The Elephant clan decided to do a drive by of the inlaws old house on the way to school and guess what was out for roadside pick up (hard rubbish, garbage collection whatevs!! Elephant laughs at me when I call it hard rubbish - is that an eastern-stater thing??) MY LADDER!!! Well... their unloved ladder... NOW its MY ladder!!

It was waaaaay too tall to stand up in my loungeroom so needed the bottom chopped off. Mr Owl was away (which is always the best time to raid his power tools) but I could not for the life of me work out how to use the damn power saw. Reverting to the good ol fashion hand saw I got so excited I actually set the ladder on fire. True story. Gave up and called on my hire a hubby (Mr Elephant) to come and finish the job and well... look at it now!!!!

*sigh* Archibald my Owl ladder LOVES his new home. How great does he look? All he needed was a lil love..... don't we all???


Thought of the moment is brought to you by the fact I am one of those weird people who gets songs stuck in their head constantly triggered by a single word!:

All you need is love.... do do do do do

We ❤ Ruffles!! | Our Market Stall Re-vamp

After almost 2 years our little business is getting a market stall makeover! We wanted to inject our love of fabrics, patterns and colour into our stall and show our faithful followers (the ones who know what people mean when they say "the table with the blue and white polka-dots") how much we have "grown up". We are big kids now!! 
It has certainly been an A-mazing time we have added a baby to the mix, juggled a hubby who flys in and out for ridiculous amounts of time, as well as a shift working hubby, toilet training children, tantruming toddlers, first time school kids and pre-pubescent boys! We have been lucky enough to meet some incredible people along the the way and learnt a heck of alot about ourselves, each other and the business world that is work-at-home hand-crafting mums!! So the time has definitely come to have a market stall that reflects how much we have changed from those 2 clueless first timers to where we are now!

Inspired by this lovely creation at Bella Studio, we started searching online for where we could purchase something similar. All the ones we found were $200-$400 and no where near as nice as what we envisioned and didn't quite meet "The Owl and the Elephant" criteria, so of course we decided we had to make our own! This meant it was time for one of our all time favourite things -  fabric shopping! And that was where the fun stopped..... next came the not so fun part MATHS! It was certainly an interesting time figuring out how to get the right amount of each fabric, how many strips of each fabric we would need to sew together to get the right length of fabric to go all around the table, and then getting the ruffle ratio to look pretty. What a flashback to high school algebra! You should see our 'working out' sheet. Josie was TOTALLY the brains behind this one *cough* she sucks at maths and Nat had to work it out pretty much single handedly whilst Josie entertained the m&m's (Max and Mischa!) with various forms of "spalarkaly" stuff *cough* copious amounts of snacks.

So for those of you wanting to play at home...here is a 'semi-tutorial' for figuring out your fabric requirements:

Trestle table = 180cm wide. We wanted to ruffle the front and sides and leave the back open for stock access and to avoid bulk and weight. So our overall length that we were wanting to ruffle was 330cm (75cm side + 180cm front + 75cm side)
We had 7 fabrics we wanted to use. The length of our table from top to floor is 75cm. So 75cm ÷ 7 = 10.7cm. We then added allowance for the top of the ruffle seam and an overhang so each ruffle covered the next one slightly, and made our strips 12cm 'deep'. 
After purchasing a ruffling foot (best....thing.....EVER!!!) we did many trials to find the perfect number of ruffles and the perfect depth that gave us the look we wanted. This worked out to just under a 2:1 ratio, meaning for every 2 metres of fabric we got just under 1 metre of ruffled fabric. So our 7 gorgeous fabric prints were cut into 12cm strips and we used 6 full fabric widths, sewn together to make around 6m per fabric type.

 Sooo bearing all of the above in mind....all up we have 42 metres of strips ready to ruffle!!
Here are some pics of the during stages...

All our strips joined together and edges overlocked (or serged) ready to put through the machine with the ruffling foot. 

Some closeups of our fabric combinations...

Feeding the strips through with the ruffling foot attachment. Best money ever spent, would have taken DAYS to sew gathering and gather them all up by hand...

Close up of the ruffling foot

Ruffly goodness glinting in the sunlight....sigh!!

And that is not all! We have more pretties in mind for our stall! Think lace canopies, Anthropologie inspired ruffle backdrops, patchwork logo-banners, shabby chic frames ad more....ahhh its is going to be divine! Can you smell it???? See us at the next Market Girl and Perth Upmarket.


If you love ruffles, be sure to check out one of our favourite Perth designers, Alana from Yuminess Textiles. Her ruffles are sought after nation-wide and we are so proud of how her business has grown. She puts the awesome in amazing!

Thought of the moment: 

Sewing: A creative mess is better than tidy idleness.  ~Author Unknown