wednesday round-up

Calender minded blog readers will already know, but for those of you that need reminding: tomorrow is freebie day. It nearly coincided with freebies to celebrate post 100, but not quite (this is post 102) but I am combining them both anyhow, so expect good things tomorrow....

But for today we have some photos and some answers to some questions!

Yesterday the postman bought me my prize from cupcakes for clara 6 gorgeous cards with hand lined envelopes and a little gift tag and a lovely business card too, all packaged in a lovely cupcake bag :-) thank you thank you thank you :-)

Today the postman bought me this:

Two more gorgeous flowers, which will be sewn to bags, which will be sewn as soon as possible! But look at that super cute card! Cecil is in love !!

I've been busy making samples for someone the last few days and he hasn't seen them yet so I can't show them here yet BUT I have also made these...

...little gift tags to add to the parcels I send out...see, once upon a time the name
paper-and-string really did stand for the materials I used, perhaps i should now be called felt-and-fluff !! hahahaha

Now for the questions. I have had a few emails recently asking me which sewing machine I use and it's this battered looking Toyota. Believe it or not, John found this for me in the bin alley at the end of our road! The plan was to raid it for bits and spare parts but it works perfectly! I have a newer Toyota which I have had since college, but the flywheel keeps coming undone (every 5 or 6 stitches!) and this baby was going to fix that one BUT now this is my everyday machine and the other one is relegated to a box in the back of a cupboard! It will get mended when I need it!

I have sewn one of my cupcakes to some cotton tape and tied it to the machine and use it as a pincushion.

Another question which comes my way quite regularly is 'how on earth do you find the time'? Now don't get excited, I don't have a recipe to create 3 spare hours a day or anything as wonderful as that but I do have my sewing trays. Honestly, a simple tray can turn your spare few minutes into craft time!

All I do is have a project on the go all the time:

This is my tray with unfinished projects so when I have a spare few minutes I can just pick it up and sew something. The trick is to have lots of half done things so you don't have to think too much, just grab your needle and sew!

My tray is so great I have two!

I constantly swap between the two and, for me anyway, this works!

Of course, if I had a dedicated sewing/craft room my trays would be made redundant, they are only trays after all!

See you tomorrow for freebie extravaganza day....