Ho, Ho, Ho and on We Sew March Link Party and Giveaway

Welcome to the third of our monthly Ho, Ho, Ho and on We Sew Link Parties.

Last month's winner of the Bustle and Sew Handstitched Christmas eBook was Mara who has already highlighted a few projects to try for her Christmas crafting :)

Paula and I have a great giveway lined up for you this month too, and with St Patrick's Day a highlight of this month, it is very apt that this month's giveaway sponsor is the lovely Cindy from

Cindy, who lives in the beautiful city of Galway in the West of Ireland, has donated these very Christmassy Perle threads for one lucky linker.

The threads are perfect for hand quilting, but if that is not your thing how about a spot of Sashiko?
I had never tried Sashiko but I recently found this new embroidery magazine when I was browsing the craft magazines at my local newsagent.

I really want to have a go at that hoop, but it is all hand-embroidered and I think I might need to work up to it :) Inside though there was a project that I thought I could handle.

The Sashiko pouch uses Perle thread to join up the dots and seemed like the perfect introduction to this type of embroidery. Fortunately I had some Perle thread lurking in my stash so set to work. It came together really quickly and the Sashiko embroidery itself was straightforward to do once I got the hang of stitching through the linen and the fusible fleece backing.

Every year I give my sons' wife and girlfriends bottles of nail polish in their Christmas stockings, and this year I have already bought the polish thanks to an online deal that was too good to resist, so now I have at least one pouch made to put them in too!

If you are getting ahead of yourself too this month and have completed a Christmas gift or holiday project in March, link up to this month's Link Party, which is hosted by Karen at Easy Patchwork.
I can't wait to see what project she has lined up for us this month.

The link-up will remain open until March 31st, but if you don't manage to complete your project in time to be in with a chance of winning the giveaway, fear not! We have loads of great giveaway prizes lined up for the coming months, thanks to the support from our very generous sponsors.






  

So head on over to Karen at Easy Patchwork and start linking up those projects!

Paying it Forward

 The lovely and very talented Catherine at Knotted Cotton hosted a Pay it Forward gift on her blog some time ago, and I, with two other lucky bloggers Caroline and Kay, was lucky enough to be picked as a recipient.

Naturally with a timescale of one year attached to the gifting, I had forgotten all about it until I received this gorgeous pouch in the post!

Liberty and linen, what a great combination,but then the icing on the cake - all that beautiful hand stitching too! Apparently there was considerable chocolate consumption involved in the making of this pouch, which you can read about here. I have to say though, Catherine, it is definitely worth wrecking a diet for :) Those are 1 inch squares!!

So, now that I have received my gift from Catherine, it is my turn to Pay it Forward, which is where you come in.

If you would like to receive a handmade gift from this little corner of blogland sometime in the next year, then just leave a comment to say so. I will undertake to send a handmade gift to the first three commenters who wish to participate. The only stipulation is that, upon receipt of your gift, you must be willing to Pay it Forward to 3 more bloggers in turn within a year. That's not too onerous now is it!


Now I am off to play with my beads and decide what deserves to be stored inside all that Liberty and linen loveliness :)

Stamped and Dispatched

If you are reading this before 00.00GMT on October 5th, don't worry there is still time to link up your project for the

You will find the link ups here

If you are reading this after 00.00GMT on October 5th then it is time to vote for your favourites, check out all of the gorgeous entries and vote for one winner in each category here 

A few weeks ago I showed you my first ever hand-carved stamp for the

 

This was practise for Nicky's Stamp it Up Swap, and as it happened my partner in the swap was the lovely Nicky herself. Knowing that I would be on holiday for the swap deadline I rushed in to the Art Supplies shop in town and bought myself a decent lino cutter and more erasers. 

I had bought an Art Nouveau design book when we were living in Riga, so decided to try and use something from it for my next stamp.  Many of the designs were too big for the erasers I had, so I decided to try and highlight an element of a design instead. 

An ivy leaf seemed like an appropriate stamp for a blogger who goes by the name Mrs Sew and Sow, don't you think?

So with the stamp sorted out, the next thing I had to work out was what to stamp it on!

Months ago I bought a set of patterns for variously sized pleated pouches from Michelle Patterns with the intention of joining in a SAL, but never actually got around to making them, so this, I decided, was the perfect opportunity to dig them out and finally make one of the pouches.

And here it is, I used some linen for the exterior and a Lu Summers fabric for the interior, which I forgot to take a photograph of, but you can check it out on Nicky's blog because she was more organised than I am :)

With some fabric scraps inside, the stamped pouch just made the post before we headed off on holiday.

When I came back here is what was waiting for me from my lovely swap partner Susi!

Isn't it lovely, there were also a couple of packets of sweets in the package too but my sons swiped those before I got a chance to take the photograph :)

This was a great swap, there were some amazing stamps being produced. If you have never tried eraser stamp carving, I can definitely recommend it, and if you would like to try it keep your fingers crossed and your eyes peeled for a second round of

Linking up to Crazy Mom Quilts

and TGIFF

and