Tweed bow necklace

Super excited about this latest project for Gathered by Mollie Makes (out 21/12 - what a good date!). I've always wanted to do a tweed bow necklace but a combination of not having enough confidence (and not getting my Singer skills on) meant it had been sitting in my head for a while, crying like a puppy left outside a shop. Nice image…

Anyway, it's (again) an easy make. Took me all of ten minutes more or less. You can sew it if you like, but I made mine from hemming tape. Check it out coming to an iPad near you this Friday

Red velvet and gold Christmas wreath

[caption id="attachment_181" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Trad wreath[/caption]

My first ever wreath and it was easy peasy. Small wreath, velvet and gold ribbon from good old Hobbycraft. Bit of hot glue to get me going, and done! Bit trad, but we all like a bit of trad at Christmas.

Appliqué hearts

As I've said before, my style of crafting has never been neat. Which is why I kick ass at applique – well, this a-seven-year-old-did-it-so-lets-pretend-it's-good style of applique anyway. Framed up, they'll work as nice little Christmas pressies (can you tell we're having a thrifty Christmas in the Monty household this year?) and obviously they work wonders for using up your scraps.

I am rather addicted to this sort of thing right now… and can see here and here and here

Appliqué cat

[caption id="attachment_85" align="aligncenter" width="604"] Mieow[/caption]

More appliqué, this time a cat – a rather pompous-looking cat at that. A pompuss… Sorry.

I tried to get the stitches around his feet to look like claws, and had great fun experimenting with various stitch tequniques (some I might have made up on my own, not sure) for his markings. Think a ginger one will work well in future too.

Gathered by Mollie Makes

It's technically off-sale now – but then when is a digital magazine not on sale, huh? – but I totally should mention that one of my projects features in issue 4 of our sister magazine for iPad, Gathered by Mollie Makes. Utterly proud to be in there, as it's my first ever published project. Having worked on crafting magazines (on and off) since 2005, I've been dabbling, doing my own thang for a bit (as you'll see). All very slap dash and not really what you'd call conventional.

I've never been asked to do anything as far as freelancing goes – I'm not massively confident for one thing, and so I was rather thrilled to be asked to see if I could do some bow clips. Looked pretty simple to me, so I gave it a go and – tah dah! They're uber-simple and really effective.

As you can imagine, I'm a much more confident crafter now, so much so that you'll see a couple of my other projects coming up in Gathered soon.

Very proud to have this little tag:

Woodland fox applique

Woodland is huge right now – can't move in New Look for owl jumpers, that's for sure. I've always been a badger girl at heart, but this fat quarter more or less forced me to abduct it for cash, and so a fox was plotted.

He's not finished yet - got the tip of his tail, face and ears to sort, but I like how he's coming along. Tempted to transfer him to a jumper – but I have a badger planned for that. One day…

Woodland fox applique

Woodland is huge right now – can't move in New Look for owl jumpers, that's for sure. I've always been a badger girl at heart, but this fat quarter more or less forced me to abduct it for cash, and so a fox was plotted.

He's not finished yet - got the tip of his tail, face and ears to sort, but I like how he's coming along. Tempted to transfer him to a jumper – but I have a badger planned for that. One day…