Free Printable Winter Colouring Page - Toddle About Lockdown Activity Guide

I have a new colouring page to share with you - this winter themed design appears in the January/ February edition of The Toddle About Lockdown Activity Guide! The guide is FREE to download / read online and includes lots of ideas for things to do at home with your little ones, online classes, competitions as well as activities for grown ups!

Read the Lockdown Activity Guide here 

You can also download my colouring page via the link below. I would love to see your finished colouring - leave a comment below, or if you share your pictures on Instagram or Facebook tag me @hazelfishercreations or use #myhfcmakes

Download your Free Winter colouring page here 

The sheet is available in both A4 and letter size pages as well as JPG and PDF formats, so you can choose whichever one suits you best to download and print.
** Please note: this free printable is for personal use only! You can print it as many times as you like for your own personal use, but you may not redistribute it in any form or modify it or claim it as your own.  If you would like to share the colouring page with your friends, on your blog/ Pinterest etc. please include a link back to this page (not the download link). Thank you!

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Click here to see more colouring pages here

Free Printable Colouring Page - Zoo Animals

It's a new year but we are back in lockdown again! To give you and your little ones something to do while staying home I will be posting more free printable colouring pages and sharing other creative ideas over the next few weeks.

Today's colouring page has a zoo animals theme, filled with lots of details to colour. I would love to see your finished colouring - leave a comment below, or if you share your pictures on Instagram or Facebook tag me @hazelfishercreations or use #myhfcmakes

Download your Free Zoo Animals colouring page here 

The sheet is available in both A4 and letter size pages as well as JPG and PDF formats, so you can choose whichever one suits you best to download and print.
** Please note: this free printable is for personal use only! You can print it as many times as you like for your own personal use, but you may not redistribute it in any form or modify it or claim it as your own.  If you would like to share the colouring page with your friends, on your blog/ Pinterest etc. please include a link back to this page (not the download link). Thank you!

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Click here to see more colouring pages here

Free Printable Colouring Page - Rockets in Space

I have created another free printable colouring page for you! This time it has a space theme, with retro inspired rockets, an astronaut, stars and planets. I would love to see what colours you choose to colour this in - leave a comment below, or if you share your pictures on Instagram or Facebook tag me @hazelfishercreations or use #myhfcmakes

Download your Free Rockets in Space colouring page here 

The sheet is available in both A4 and letter size pages as well as JPG and PDF formats, so you can choose whichever one suits you best to download and print.
** Please note: this free printable is for personal use only! You can print it as many times as you like for your own personal use, but you may not redistribute it in any form or modify it or claim it as your own.  If you would like to share the colouring page with your friends, on your blog/ Pinterest etc. please include a link back to this page (not the download link). Thank you!

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See more colouring pages here.

Free Printable Colouring Page - Butterflies and Flowers

It's been a long time since I last wrote a blog post - I had to remind myself how I actually write one and the html code I need use! The spread of the corona virus has turned the world upside down and life for so many of us has dramatically changed over the last few weeks. It's a strange and scary time, but more important than ever to look out for one another as well as looking after ourselves. I wanted to find ways that I can try to do something more to help. If you are staying at home for the foreseeable future, home schooling children or just want something to take your mind off the news for a while, art and creativity can be really helpful.
I have designed a free printable colouring page for you to download and colour and am planning some other ideas which I will share with you soon. You can also check out all my past craft project posts here. This butterflies and flowers colouring page design has lots of details, so should keep you or your children occupied for a while!

I would love to see your coloured pages - leave a comment below, or if you share your pictures on Instagram or Facebook tag me @hazelfishercreations or use #myhfcmakes

Download your Free colouring page here

The sheet is available in both A4 and letter size pages as well as JPG and PDF formats, so you can choose whichever one suits you best to download and print.
** Please note: this free printable is for personal use only! You can print it as many times as you like for your own personal use, but you may not redistribute it in any form or modify it or claim it as your own.  If you would like to share the colouring page with your friends, on your blog/ Pinterest etc. please include a link back to this page (not the download link). Thank you!

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See more colouring pages here.

Pottery Painting at Blue Owl

Last summer my sister and I visited Blue Owl, a pottery painting studio, cafe and gift shop, in Great Horkesley, (just outside Colchester) Essex. We really enjoyed our visit and would definitely recommend taking a trip there yourself if you are in the area!
The building itself is a converted country pub - a beautiful old building, full of character (including wood beams). Everyone at Blue Owl is very friendly and the place has a lovely, relaxed atmosphere. We enjoyed sampling the cakes on offer and browsing the gifts before choosing some pottery to paint. There is a very wide range of pottery items to choose from: coasters, mugs, plates, figurines, tea pots, vases and much more! With so much choice it was hard to pick what to paint, but after a lot of pondering we each decided to paint a plate.



My friend, the talented illustrator Helen Smith, works in the kiln room and is Blue Owl's resident artist so she was able to give us a tour of the kiln room and show us how the pottery painting process works which was very interesting! I had never done pottery painting before, only having worked a little with ceramics back at school and in art college, so I really enjoyed learning something new.

Inktober 2018 Round-up - Days 1-10

I began Inktober with the best of intentions to draw everyday, however, as it often does things got busy and I've fallen behind. I will still complete my list of 31 prompts, it will just end up being 'Inkvember' instead of 'Inktober'!!!
Here's a round-up of my drawings for days 1-10...

Rabbit Cut and Sew Doll Design

Creating a cut and sew fat quarter design was the challenge for this week's Spoonflower contest. I have been wanting to design more cut and sew projects for a while, so the contest was a perfect prompt for me to work on this!

Floral Butterflies Surface Pattern Design

This week's Spoonflower design challenge has a limited colour palette theme - the brief allowed us to create a design on any theme we liked so long as we used at least 3 of the colours specified by Spoonflower (black or white accents were also allowed).
I decided to create a floral and butterfly themed design...

Christmas Gingerbread and Candy on teal - my entry to Spoonflower's Challenge

With such a fun theme I couldn't miss out on designing for Spoonflower's Gingerbread contest!  This colourful design is created from my pen, watercolour, coloured pencil and felt tip pen illustrations of gingerbread houses, gingerbread men, Christmas trees, candy canes and lollipops.  This was a really fun design to make and I loved working with these colours!

Inktober 2017 Roundup

I took part in Inktober again this year - a month long drawing challenge where thousands of artists (both amateur and professional) from around the world make a drawing in ink every day of October and post their pictures online.  Last year I joined in but didn't quite manage to do a drawing every day, so this year my aim was to just do something, even if it was small, every day - and I did it!
I kept my drawings small this year, so it was more realistic to be able to finish them. Mostly I was drawing in the evening and I have to admit there were a few nights when I was feeling tired and not particularly wanting to pick up my sketchbook, but I didn't want to miss a day.
I think it's a great challenge to take part in and I'm sure my drawing has benefited, it's also nice to draw just for fun on a variety of subjects.  If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook you will have already seen my drawings, but I wanted to share just a few of my favourites here too.  Which ones are your favourites?

My entry to Spoonflower's Black and White Colouring Book Contest

This week's Spoonflower contest is being held in conjunction with Lake, a colouring app, and we could create a design on any subject we liked, so long as it was in black and white.  Such open ended contests like this can be the hardest - how do you choose what theme to draw!? They also produce an amazing, diverse mix of entries, it's wonderful to see how creative everyone else has been!

Spoonflower's Annual Tea Towel Calendar Contest

It's time for Spoonflower's annual tea towel calendar contest again! It's hard to believe how quickly this time of year comes around and this is the 4th year I have taken part in the contest!  I sketched a few ideas out for the calendar and chose to work up this feathers and flowers design for my entry.  My feathers and arrows fabric design has been popular on Spoonflower, so I thought I would like to add some new feathers designs - starting with this calendar!

Printable Advent Calendar Town Tutorial (video!)

I am excited to introduce my latest design - a printable colour-in Advent calendar town!  You may already have seen (or even made up yourself) my Advent calendar village and the houses in the new town are larger than the village houses.  They are all designed to the same scale though, so you can mix and match small and large houses to create your own Advent calendar with space for different sized sweets and gifts!
You could also make up the houses to use as gift boxes, or decorations at Christmas.

I have created a video tutorial sharing tips and instructions on how to make up the town.  I hope that you enjoy it!



If you have questions or comments please leave them below! :)

Visit my Etsy shop to buy the printable kits and make up your own:
Colour-In Advent Calendar Town
Colour-In Advent Calendar Village

More Circus Designs for Spoonflower

Continuing with the Circus theme, here is my entry to this week's Spoonflower design challenge; Circus Performers.  My design features girls (inspired by 1920s fashion) performing acrobatics,  gynastics (rhythmic ribbons!) and on the flying trapeze!  This week's theme was the one I was most looking forward to designing for and I enjoyed drawing the girls - first in pencil then pen line drawing, which I scanned then coloured digitally.  I added the stars, swirls and dots to give a sense of movement to the design.  As with all of this month's circus challenges, there was a limited colour palette to use.  The colours are probably not ones I would have chosen myself (yellow isn't a colour I usually use a lot of) but I actually like the yellow as a background for this and how the other colours work with it.



* UPDATE*
Thank you if you voted for my Circus Performers design - it came 32nd (with 86 votes) out of 135 entries!
You can see all the winners on Spoonflower here.

This design is now available to buy from Spoonflower - you can find it in my shop here.

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Below is my entry to last week's challenge; Animal Alphabet Limited Colour Palette.  It features some of the animals I used in my first circus design, plus some new ones; a zebra, giraffe and bear on a unicycle!!  The colour palette for this one was probably the most challenging for me - most of the animals were fine but I struggled to like any of the colours for the elephant.  I'm looking forward to playing around with these a bit more after the challenges with some different colour combinations.


Thank you if you voted for my design in the contest! The results are now in and my Animal Alphabet design came 65th out of 146 entries.  I definitely recommend you visit Spoonflower's blog to see the other entries, there were lots of great designs and Elena Naylor's winning Cat Circus Alphabet is a particularly fun and creative design! :)

My Entry to Spoonflower's 'Retro Circus' Design Contest

Roll up, roll up! The Circus is in town!
For the next 4 weeks Spoonflower's design challenges each have a theme based around the circus; Retro Circus, Animal Alphabet, Circus Performers, and Big Top Treats.

I'm having lots of fun working on these designs, although they are challenging too.  All the contests are limited colour palette and the colours aren't necessarily ones I would have chosen myself. However, the restricted choice of colours has forced me to think carefully about my designs and I actually really like the colours in this one now!


I gave myself plenty of time to start work on my circus designs and I've enjoyed having more time and less pressure to complete the first one (which amazingly I entered into the contest early, not on the last day like usual!).

Spoonflower Fabric Makes

I love to see my fabric designs come to life, being made up into something, and it is especially thrilling to hear from customers who have purchased my designs from Spoonflower and see what they have made! Here are a few...

The talented Rebecca from Elizabeth's Closet has made these gorgeous dresses, they would be so lovely for little girls to play in! She makes them in a range of sizes, from newborn to 7. You can find Elizabet's Closet on Etsy or follow on Instagram or Facebook. (Rebecca also has another shop on Etsy  where she sells adorable hair accessories: Elizabeth's Bow Shop)

Find the Hot Air Balloon dress here and my fabric on Spoonflower here.


This cute pink donuts dress can be purchased from Elizabeth's Closet here and you can find the fabric on Spoonflower here.

My Design for Spoonflower's 'Whimsical Watercolour Insects' Challenge

This week's Spoonflower challenge theme is 'Whimsical Watercolour Insects'.  I remembered that I had drawn some pen and watercolour beetles in my sketchbook a while ago so decided it was a good opportunity to return to that theme and create a finished design!  Also, I'm not that keen on real creepy crawlies but I thought beetles would be something I could make into a fun and colourful pattern.

My Design for Spoonflower's 'Rainforest Animals' Challenge

This week's Spoonflower challenge theme was 'Rainforest Animals' so I got out my watercolour paints, pencils and pens to create a tropical rainforest inspired design! I knew I wanted my design to be quite a busy pattern, filled with leaves and initially I researched lots of different animals to include too. For the final design though I decided to narrow it down to just toucans, macaws and blue butterflies.

Quick and Easy Watercolour Valentine's Day Card

I couldn't let Valentine's Day pass without sharing a card with you.  This one's really quick and easy to make - it's also a good excuse just to play with some watercolours!

How to Finish Tea Towels From Spoonflower

If you are inexperienced at sewing you might be unsure how to finish off tea towels from Spoonflower - it's really quick and simple when you know how, so this tutorial is for you!  There is a great range of tea towel designs available to buy for Spoonflower (I have 3 in my shop including the Toucan design featured in this blog post).  You can purchase them either as a single fat quarter of fabric, or 4 on 1 yard (Linen-Cotton Canvas is the best fabric to choose for tea towels).  When you receive your tea towel you will find it comes as an unfinished piece of fabric, which you will need to sew a hem around to neaten the edges.