Garden Swap - Sent

Nova has now received her garden swap package, so I can blog a few photos I took before I posted...

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Sketchbook -

Inspired by garden plans, I decided to make Nova a fabric covered sketchbook with felt applique trees and fench knot and bead flowers.

Felt and button tress with embroidered ladybird on the spine.
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More photos in my Flickr 'swap set' - link
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I really enjoyed doing this swap! - Thanks for being a great swap partner Nova & big thanks to Kerry for organising it x

New buttons, a penguin parade and some lovely fabric!

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New buttons at incy wincy stitches -

I’ve been looking into getting some unique handmade buttons to add to my website for some time now … and I didn’t have to look far! Check out these beautiful buttons from two Crafteroo members, Gill and Glue&Glitter…

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Laura from Glue&Glitter made me some ‘hello’ buttons a while back for a mini quilt I was making and I just had to buy some more for my site. Check out her cute Matryoshka doll set plus many more here.

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Plus Gill who I worked with on the Crafteroo Combined Challenge makes the most wonderful polymer clay buttons … there big, there bright and I just love them!

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Both Laura and Gill's buttons would make great card embellishments or could be used to customise clothing, accessoires etc...

New Buttons - www.incywincystitches.com/page27.htm

Sets shown here - 1&3. Matryoshka doll set and spotty tea cup set by Glue&Glitter, 2. Polymer clay heart button set by Gill

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Penguin parade
Emma’s playgroup is having a summer fayre next Saturday, which involves a little parade around the village followed by lots of stalls and activites at the primary school. Playgroup has decided to dress up as penguins this year and here’s the mask that Emma helped make on Friday.

I’ve also modified Em’s Halloween cat costume into a little penguin suit with fluffy wings! I’ll add pics of the full costume and parade at the weekend.

Patchwork fabric -
I brought this gorgeous patchwork fabric from John Lewis yesterday, which I’m going to turn into a summer quilt for Em’s bed. I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it. Each square is about 2”, just imagine how long that would take to stitch!

Now, I’ve only ever worked on tiny quilts before so this is going to be a bit of a challenge for me as I’m making it to fit her single bed. Plus the seam lines aren’t exactly straight, so I’m not quite sure how I’m going to do the quilting stitch? I think I’ll try to ‘stitch in the ditch’ as much as possible, but it’s not going to be very straight! … But maybe this will add a bit of character to it?

I actually have a few quilting questions, if anyone has any top tips … Do you pre-wash your fabric? I’ve read many tutorials and books where some do and some don’t!? - Do you pre-wash to avoid shrinkage? Or wash after to give it that puckered up/aged look?
Also, I usual lightly thread tack my mini quilts to hold the top fabric, wadding and back fabric together whilst I machine stitch, then remove the stitches after. But it will take a very long time to tack a quilt of this size! Would you thread tack a piece this big? or just use pins/quilters safety pins?

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Right must get back to my orders and catch the post… ttfn. x

Swap Mad!

Yes, I think I've got the swap bug this year! It seems as soon as one has been posted I find another one I fancy getting involved in. This time it's the Granny Square Swap over on Spans' Stitchin's blog - http://spans-stitchin.blogspot.com/

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Now, if you've always wanted to try crochet but have never actually given it a go this might be the swap for you, as Hannah has added some granny square tutorials and instructions on her blog to help first timers.

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Really looking forward to getting my hooks out and doing a bit of crocheting whilst sitting in the sunshine :)