A tail of two rabbits,

It's the school holidays here in the UK, which also means I get very little time to work in between all the other parenting stuff.  The offshoot is there's very little to blog about, hence the quietness here!

Until the other day, I'd promised the kids a comic each, and during the hour (it felt like an hour!) it took them both to choose one, I went browsing amongst the sewing magazines and discovered...

Sew Hip, issue 32 - September 2011, has a pattern extracted from my book in it!  I knew there were a few projects placed by the publisher as features, but didn't know what, when or where.

It's the baby Rabbits that are featured, along with their personalised tails.

Although the dates still look odd to me being a Brit.  As the book publisher is American, the dates were stitched with the month first, followed by the day.

If you do buy the magazine and make a Rabbit, remember to join the Countryside Softies Flickr group and post what you've made.

Spoons,

You may remember a while ago I posted a sneaky peek of something I'd been designing.  That something is spoons.  After collecting some ideas together on Pinterest, I began working on the first pattern for bringing the idea in my head to life...

The first attempt didn't quite work.  I made it using two layers of felted wool, with darts to achieve the spoon shape, but the whole thing was a bit on the flat side.  The idea then began to develop towards the idea of welsh love spoons.

This one is a bit more like what I am trying to sculpt.  

It's still a bit of a work in progress design wise,

but as a project, it's certainly fulfilling the desire to move away from the cute animals are try something a bit different.  Only problem is, they are hard to photograph without it looking,

...a little bit phallic!

I look down, and I see...

a sucked in tummy clad in Orla Kiely!

This is my new Ebay purchase, an Orla dress and I love it!

 

I'm not as fond of all the Orla patterns as I am of the scribble design.  You may have noticed my blog background changed when I realised you can make the pattern in Photoshop.

It's a birthday present to myself, am 41 tomorrow, eeeeeek!

Very cross, cross stitch,

 

Apologies for the lack of posting this week.  The last few days have been a bit of a mixed bag.  Work wise I'm working on a really interesting freelance project involving cross stitch.  The flip side is that the word 'cross' has been very prevalent.  Don't wish to go into too much detail but Lucy was attacked in the playground at school on Monday by another pupil.  Hopefully the rest of the week will be a little calmer!

Mooooooooooooo,

There have been a few of these giveaways popping up on the internet lately, and I'm really pleased to be part of the fun now as Moo have very kindly asked if my blog readers would be interested in some of their new sticker range.  Would you?

I've been a Moo user since I began blogging, in particular the mini cards which I use as business cards but also as swing tags for my Softies (punch a hole in one end and attach with string).

So what is the deal?  Moo are providing 50 of their new round stickers and also 50 of the rectangular stickers to 5 blog readers.

If you're a winner, you can upload your own images, or choose from a vast range of ready made artwork and templates and personalise them with your own details. Moo's unique printing technology, 'printfinity' allows you to place a different image or design on every sticker and there's a range of options to create custom sticky products including uploading company logos and photos to embellish your own products branding.

I'd be very surprised if you hadn't come across Moo before given they produce just about the best sticker books, business cards, postcards and greetings cards out there.

For a chance to win one of the 5 sets of 100 stickers (that's 50 of each new shape), just post a comment on this post saying what you would use them for.  The giveaway will close next Wednesday, 6th July at midnight (GMT).

I'm kind of hoping no-one enters, that way I can have all the freebies!

edited to add - there have been a few problems with leaving comments, so I've changed my comment settings whilst the giveaway is running, just please make sure you leave an email address so we can contact you if you win, thanks.