Cuppa pins!
I participated in a “Fabric Lover’s” swap recently, where the participants were challenged to create a variety of items related to fabric crafts. There were seven themes; one of them was TINY, meaning items were supposed to be two inches or smaller. My swap partner had expressed a great fondness for tea, so I came up with the idea of using a plastic bottlecap as the base for a pin cushion in the shape of a teacup.
As I often do when I come up with a craft idea, I Googled it to see if anyone else had ever made something similar. An image seach on “teacup pin cushion” yielded many interesting results. Most of them were actual china teacups that had been turned into pin cushions. How clever! But not workable for the TINY theme. I did eventually find an adorable little teacup pin cushion over at tasket basket crafts , precisely what I had in mind!
In turn, that web site linked to verybigjen’s flickr page, which has a detailed tutorial on how to make bottlecap pin cushions. I started by making a basic bottlecap pin cushion, exactly like verybigjen’s. Her instructions are great, and my little blue pin cushion came out very cute. One of the unexpected perks was that it nestles so comfortably right in the crook of your hand, as Jen shows in one of her photos.
Feeling more confident, I moved on to making a teacup. I thought it might be fun to try to make it less mug-shaped and more dainty-cup-shaped. So I used half of an old plastic Easter egg as the base. I don’t have a full tutorial, but here are some pics of the progress of my project.
I used elastic for the handle, with the idea that you could slip it over your thumb or index finger when you were using the pin cushion. When I was done, I didn’t like how it looked… it looked too plain and the edge of the cup looked too wavy. Adding some trim at the top and a decorative stitch all the way around helped. But I also discovered that it fell over a lot, despite the little felt “foot” at the bottom. So I decided to try again.
This time, I tried making one almost exactly like the one from tasket basket crafts, with the excpetion of the handle. I kept the handle elastic.
My swap partner said she liked it; I am so pleased!
P.S. The blue pin cushion is made from a soda bottle cap. The flowered teacup was from a different cap that was slightly larger and slightly flared — sorry, I can’t even recall what the bottle was!
What a great idea. The teacup iis absolutely precious. I wonder if I used an old EOS or REVO container rather then then a plastic easter egg, if the bottom would be flat enough to keep it fron falling over. I’ll have to give this one a try. Thank-you so much for sharing.
Great tutorial, thank you so much for sharing! Greetings from Janine, Germany