Making things with my own hands.

Got the idea to try making paper from my Japanese friend - she was telling me about how how she used to make paper at home

One year ago, on 9 March, I celebrated my wedding with my husband. To mark the occasion in a way that’s most relevant to this hobby blog of mine, I wanted to share the various hand-made items that were part of my wedding. The first four were made by me (and if you’ve seen my posts before, might find them familiar). The last one was something done by a friend of my sister, which I really love! I hope this inspires you to consider incorporating more hand-made items to mark spec

In a bid to be more environmentally-friendly, I have been trying to minimize buying new things where I can. This Chinese New Year, I challenged myself not to buy anything brand new (it used to be a tradition to buy new clothes to wear during this festive season), but still come up with new outfits. One of the ideas I had was to add a little something to an old clothing piece I had but never wore much! Remember this shift dress I made 4 years ago at Sew Over It? I wear it some

My sister just relocated to Hong Kong for work, and I was visiting. She was looking for some more permanent company in her apartment, and was inspired to make a polar bear after seeing it at her friend’s place. I was enlisted to put him together during my week there. This polar bear paper sculpture is 1.5m tall, and was made of many pieces of paper. After some warm-up practice with a smaller bird project, we decided that my sister would do the cutting, and I would do the past

“So, what’s your next project?” This has become a more common question I get asked when I meet my friends these days. I feel a small sense of pride, because my hobby has somewhat shaped my identity, and my friends now know me as the one who does all these random / diverse craft workshops / projects. Beyond my identity, this hobby has also shaped my values in life (and also offered a number of opportunities to ponder about the parallels between craft and life, but that’s anoth

I’ve unofficially tried to embroider stuff before, but only basic things like words (and doing it based on logic, without any instructions, so I didn’t know cool stitches). I was delighted to find a complete starter kit on Hoffelt & Hooper Co. while browsing Etsy for random DIY ideas. Even more amazing was that I could customize text on the design! I thought it would be a great project that could be used for my upcoming wedding 🙂 The kit was delivered in a neat little box wh

Was wondering how to celebrate the milestone of turning thirty, and decided that it would be fun to do something with my hands. Thank goodness my dexterity and eyesight were reasonably still in place, and we pulled through to finish this musical globe kit. This was as similar set to the Musical Carousel Box  I made a while back from a DIY kit my friend bought. After that experience, we got smarter, and started a bit earlier + did it at her place (to avoid being chased out to

Visited the dreamy Studio Ghibli museum in Tokyo, and brought home a little DIY sewing kit to create my own Totoro! Built him as a little project on a Saturday – thank goodness I have some basic sewing background, because the instructions were all in Japanese! Grateful for diagrams and my knowledge of Chinese characters (so I could roughly make out some parts of the instructions) Although the end product is so cute, some parts of the process didn’t look quite as adorable, esp

The idea of building a clock from scratch that can run on its own (without batteries) sounded really interesting. We bought this assembly box set from a shop in Taiwan that claimed to do just that – it’s based on a clock that runs on an escapement sketched by Leonardo Da Vinci. I was planning to complete the clock to check off the one thing I am supposed to make in December (had a KPI to make at least once thing every month in 2017). We had originally assumed this would be an

Sometime ago, I was inspired by a DIY wall clock project I came across on pinterest. The writer reassured that it was really simple, so I thought — why not? The photo of the project was really simple and beautiful: From The Lovely Drawer I sourced for all of the parts at spotlight: the round wooden piece, and the clock bits (hands + movement). I wanted to find a round chopping board similar to the one in the original project, but most were quite thick, and I wasn’t sure if th

During the Christmas season, a good friend asked if I’d like to help build a carousel fair box set she bought. I said, “sure!”, because I love Christmas, carousels, making stuff, and how difficult can assembling be, right? Boy, were we wrong. We started by laying out the contents of the set, and some first hints to the challenge we were up for were (which didn’t quite hit us hard upon first impact): #1 Every piece was tiny – but we didn’t realise what tiny meant until later #