Bergamot Bunny Archives - Violet LeBeaux

DIY Bergamot Bunny Baseball Cap Tutorial!

by VioletLeBeaux | Dec 17, 2014 | Craft, Hair-Accessory-Tutorials, Other-Accessory-Tutorials, Tutorial

Yay! A really fun project today: Bergamot Bunny baseball cap make over! Argh so fricking cute, I want to wear it all the time! I previously made this cap over but I haven’t worn it in ages so it was time for another rethink: answer? Bergamot ears!

For this tutorial you will need:

Baseball cap
Cardboard
White fabric
Felt or roving for the pink parts of the ears
Lace for the bow
Hot glue
Needle and thread

Draw the Bergamot ear shape on to a piece of cardboard.

Cut them out!

Cut a rectangle of the white fabric big enough to cover the ear on both sides. I’m using some fluffy polar fleece.

Roughly draw the shape onto the fabric and draw where the heart will go on the ear as well.

Cut the extra off around the edges.

I decided to needle felt the pink heart in place but you can just use a piece of felt and stitch it on depending on which materials you have on hand.

Place the cardboard inside and the fold the fabric in half around it. Repeat for the other ear as well.

Now stitch or hot glue the fabric onto the cardboard so it covers it nicely and looks neat.

Now make a little lace bow as well. You can make the bow out of lace or ribbon depending on your tastes, it just needs to be as wide as both the ears because we will use it to hide the base later.

Now on your cap, use an unpicker to open a seam at the top.

Poke the ears through the hole and either stitch or hot glue them in place. Make sure you stitch or glue the seam on either side of the ears too otherwise it will unravel later.

Hot glue or stitch the ears together so they won’t flop around.

Lastly, glue the bow at the base of the ears to hide the seam.

All finished!

Really you could do this with just about any kind of hat as long as you could poke a hole in a seam!

Only thing to do now is enjoy it!

Bunny impression?

I know what I’ll be wearing all the time now! What do you guys think??

Site Updates and News

by VioletLeBeaux | Nov 7, 2014 | Notices

So it’s been a really, really, really long time since I did a round up of the site updates I do behind the scenes but I finally have a minute to sit down and breath so I wanted to put one together!

Design:

Changed theme and recoded the entire thing.
Remade responsive design to work on tablet and mobile devices.
Removed left side bar
Made top navigation sticky.
Removed a bunch of right sidebar widgets
Removed social media buttons. Will be looking to reintegrate them once I find a design which isn’t a drain on resources.

Pages:

Deleted a whole heap of pages which weren’t needed anymore.
Updated About, FAQ, The VLB, Categories, Shop, Hire, Contact, Editorial Policies.
Tutorial page totally reworked.
The layout of the tutorial pages had been a problem for quite some time. There is still a lot of work in sorting which needs to be done but this is a decent start. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or if there’s a particular way you want to be able to organise things?

Navigation:

Menu structure updated
Category pages actually work now, yay!
Archive pages work
Fixed the page numbers for easy browsing

Subscription:

Added better support for bloglovin.
Changed the email subscriptions from Feedburner to Mail Chimp
This was another decision that took some thought, Feedburner has been rumoured to be ending soon and I didn’t want to wait until the last minute to switch. I really prefer the look of the Mail Chimp emails too. To import the current subscriptions I had to remove everyone who hadn’t completely the double opt in. If you have stopped receiving emails please just sign up again in the sidebar!

Comments:

Installed Disqus.
There was a lot of debate over whether I should do this on Facebook/via email. People have very strong feelings about Disqus and so I didn’t really want to install it. The problem I had was server load, there are over 20,000 comments on my site and calling them from the WordPress database is VERY labour intensive from the point of view of the server and I can’t afford to bump up my plan which is already quite pricey. So the choice was getting to be Disqus vs no comments rather than Disqus vs regular comments. Hopefully this will work for the moment until we can find a better solution later.

Advertisements:

Removed Glam ads because they were a nuisance for people and their ad system kept applying features that I had specifically asked to not be a part of.
Added PassionFruit ad serving system so I can manage things myself. Still finalising the sizing.
Signed as a blogger to The Remarkables Group for sponsored content.
Added BlogHer advertising system for a trial period. Please let me know your experiences and thoughts on this in the comments!

Still to do:

Confirm mobile sites work on all devices
Fix sidebars on mobile devices
Make series of posts
Make sure each post has the correct thumbnail, particularly in the tutorial section
Add extra navigation to find tutorials eg. crochet, sewing, knitting, etc
Add social media buttons back in.
Remove gallery links, still considering this as I’m not happy with the gallery in it’s current form.
Change theme and update Bergamot Bunny site
Change theme and update Violet’s Cuties/tumblr site
Consolidate all of the FAQ’s I’ve done and add resources page

As always, let me know what you think! If you ever find anything which isn’t working, please let me know about it! This site has grown so big that I can’t keep track of everything all at once so I rely a bit on people telling me if something is not working correctly!

I’m planning some changes to the way that I make videos and blog this coming year as well. It seems a nice sense of symmetry to just finish off the year and start fresh with the different things I want to do in the new year. I’ll post properly about that all in January then!

So basically… good things to come ^_^

Thank you all for sticking with me so far, I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next!

Bergamot And Friends Pattern Grid Download!

by VioletLeBeaux | Apr 21, 2014 | Craft

Today I have a really fun reader requested pattern up for download!

Kimmi wrote to me a while ago to request downloadable patterns of Bergamot and friends for her cross stitching. It’s something that had been on my long term to do list for ages so it’s good to finally have them available!

These patterns are downloadable here or via the VLB mailing list. Each pattern is worked over 100 squares so you can adjust them as needed for the gauge you are knitting or stitching. There is one for Bergamot, Lottie, Sir Reginald and Nana Bunchkins as well as the background floral pattern for my website and also my VLB monogram.

Please note they are provided for personal use only, not for profit.

They should be suitable for knitting, crochet or cross stitch but make sure to do a swatch first so you can adjust for your personal tension.

I hope you enjoy and I can’t wait to see what you guys actually make with them! I’m thinking of doing a massive bergamot knitted sweater as my next project! Let me know what you do with them so I can add your photos to the readers gallery!

To save them just click below for the full image 🙂

Bergamot Bunny Needle Felt Patch

by VioletLeBeaux | Mar 31, 2014 | Craft, Other-Accessory-Tutorials, Tutorial

After the amount of fun we had with the VLB needle felt patch I thought it would only be fair to do a Bergamot Bunny version too!

You’ll need needle felting supplies and some white felt as well for this one.

Cut the shapes below out of felt.

Felt the round head to the body.

And the ears to the head.

Next smoosh up some white wool to cover the felt.

Begin with the ears…

And then cover up the rest in white as well.

Now for the details! In pink make her fluffy tail.

As well as the blush on her cheeks, hearts in her ears and little hands.

In this version I gave her a pink mouth and nose and a light purple “V” in her foot. I also made a little pink bow separately and added it on.

Then some big beautiful black eyes…

And so they look more like eyes and less like disturbing portals to the underworld, add in some white sparks and eyelashes.

Yay done!

Then you just need to pop a pin on the back and wear your new friend out and about!

She makes a great pin or patch to use on a bag or anything else!

Sir Reginald Bunnikins Finds Bergamot Bunny

by VioletLeBeaux | Mar 5, 2014 | Craft, Inspiration

Once upon a time, Sir Reginald Bunnikins was a very lonely bunny. Sir Reginald, or Turnip as he was known to his very close friends, had a very good job as the owner of the world’s largest tea factory. He had a sprawling manor house in the country side to spend his weekends at and a delightful city flat just near his club to enjoy during the week. Sir Reginald had all the tea he could possibly drink and some very lovely bunny friends but something always seemed to be missing.

You see, Sir Reginald had been blessed with a very good name and character but as his nickname suggested, he wasn’t so full in the brains department. In fact he had received his nickname as an homage to his best friend Violet’s most treasured romantic hero: Turnip Fitzhugh. Also his head kind of looked like a turnip.

But that was just the problem wasn’t it? Sir Reginald wasn’t much in the way of a romantic hero, he had no Arabella to rescue or eat pudding with! As a proper Victorian gentleman with no formal introductions it was rather hard for him to meet an appropriately chaperoned young bunny lady in this day and age.

The whole issue made Sir Reginald’s brain box hurt.

And so it was one day after discussing the problem with Violet, that Sir Reginald set out to find a solution to his rather larger problem. Rather!

He climbed the highest shelf he could find and grabbed some supplies.

Surely if he couldn’t be introduced to a young bunny lady, perhaps he could make one?

Sir Reginald worked tirelessly all night, only stopping for 6 tea and pudding breaks. He made a rather comely bunny body…

And a delightful bunny head…

The ears of course were the most important part, how otherwise would one be able to have a delightful chat over tea and sandwiches. And Sir Reginald really did like sandwiches.

Sir Reginald worked continuously adding all of the appropriate elements…

Hands, feet, a fluffy tail, a really big brain (because one of them ought to have one don’t you know!).

He sourced a bow from the finest couturier and added the finishing touches to his new best friend.

But what could he name her? A beautiful bunny like this without a name just appeared a bit unseemly, how would the staff be able to announce them at balls if she had no name?

After a long think, Bergamot came to mind… It was of course the key ingredient in Sir Reginald’s favourite kind of tea.

Bergamot Bunny awoke with a start and looked into the eyes of her one true love!

“Oh! Er… Hello there Miss Bunny!” Sir Reginald stuttered awkwardly.

Luckily somehow Bergamot Bunny, who had managed to acquire both a brain and a decent idea of true love, saw her opportunity and went for it!

*kissing*

How very improper! Without a chaperone and everything!

Sir Reginald was highly shocked and had to hide around the corner for a bit. Bergamot was left to roll her eyes. That was kind of a feature of their relationship from that point on.