Suzanne Carillo

I've had a little black cardi kicking around for a while. Initially I was going to add some embroidery and some fabric flowers but I've seen some super cute heart elbow patches lately and thought it would be fun to give that a go instead. The ones I'd seen were felted onto the sweater, but I didn't want to go out and buy a bunch of felting materials when I have regular good old felt right here.

I just cut out heart shapes that I'd traced with a pencil crayon onto the felt using a handy cookie cutter as my guide. Using the zig-zag on my sewing machine I stitched little border in white around each heart, and then carefully sewed these onto the elbows.

That was so much fun I decided to add some fabric buttons.

I chose a variety of fabrics from my rather large ( okay huge ) stash of fabrics and proceeded to make some new little multi-coloured buttons. You see the little blue thing and the plastic thing? That's how you make the buttons. It's very simple. You can see more here where I bought mine.

Then I thought that was all so much fun why not add on a bit of trim on the pockets? Sure!

I just stitched the trim on by hand. It's cute and adds a bit of texture.

And although I'm sure I could have added more to this cardigan I decided to stop there. I find that there is a fine line between "artsy cute" and "clowny cheap". I didn't want to cross it.