Make do and mend: bears for a baby.

Back from a lovely spell in Kent with my family - lots of delicious food, beautiful weather and lots of time splashing in a paddling pool in my parents' garden. We spent a lot of time at the beach, visiting local attractions like Leeds castle, and seeing extended family, so I'm really sorry that my promise that I was going to post every day proved a little too ambitious.

As I said, I'm back in Cardiff now and I spent this afternoon visiting my lovely friend Mary who has just had a baby girl. Baby Sophia had such a mop of black hair and was a real sweetie. It was funny for me to compare Sophia at nearly 4 weeks, with Torin - a newborn suddenly seems very easy to deal with - feed, wind, sleep, feed wind sleep . . . Of course, I'm sure the reality of actually having a newborn with a two and a half year old will be a lot of hard work!

I made Sophia's gift myself:

Her room is green and white, so I chose paper with different patterns in those colours to fit in with the room scheme.

Here's a little how-to if you want to try your own:

I began by buying a small white RIBBA frame from IKEA - they are great for this type of project as they come with a mount that is just about the right depth for what I needed.

I also used a teddy bear shaped hole punch to cut out loads of little teddy bears out of green and white paper.

I then cut out a piece of plain white card and fixed it to the back of the mount with tape, to form the background to the picture.

By eye, I then laid out the teddy shapes on the white card and moved them around a bit until I was happy with where they were - I didn't want the layout to be too strict, so I avoided creating a sequence of patterns by punching out different amounts of bears from each type of paper.

Once I was happy with the layout, I stuck the shapes onto the white background using tweezers and sticky pads - you can see from this picture how the shapes stand away from the backing card.

And that was that! Once the shapes were all stuck in place, I popped the mount back in the frame and the gift was finished.

I then wrapped the picture in brown paper and finished it off with some green curling ribbon and a green flower on which I wrote Sophia's name.

I was really pleased that Mary liked the present - she'd had a bit of a clothing overload, and was also relieved that there was no pink in sight!