When I bought this cute bunny in a little bed, I knew she needed a sweet little quilt to keep her warm. This is going to be a gift for my little niece, so I set to work creating this EPP quilt. I used pretty scraps left over from other projects and instead of paper hexagon templates, I used hexiform ones from a company called Ashmead Designs. The great thing about their hexiform shapes is that for small projects like this, you don't need any wadding/batting.

I used 1/2 inch hexagons which is the smallest shape I've ever worked with. I absolutely loved making something so miniature and I'm sure there will be more in my future! Something I love to do is combine different types of sewing, and with the hexagons being made of hexiform, it was easy to embroider tiny details on some of the hexagons.

I kept adding hexagons here and there, without worrying too much about where to put them. Once it was the size I needed, I attached a border in coordinating blue fabric and bound it with liberty bias binding. 

I hope this will be a treasured gift for many years to come! 

I love to support small businesses so I thought I would share some great online sewing shops that you might like too. This is not an advert or a paid promotion, this is entirely my own opinion and I am sharing because I think it is important to spread the word about good businesses. Today I am going to share four of my favourite UK based shops, but there are so many excellent online independent craft and sewing shops that I'm sure I will feature some others in the future.
Sew and Quilt is based in Cornwall and is an excellent online shop where you can find a gorgeous selection of quilting fabric including Liberty Tana Lawn. They also sell some fantastic tools, threads and paper templates in a vast array of shapes and sizes for English Paper Piecing. I really recommend their paper templates as they speed up the epp process immensely.  Their customer service is fantastic and ​they also go to the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham each year, so this is a great way to see their products in person. I have signed up to their Block of the Month subscription box for the first time this year and I am so excited about it. I will share details about that in another post.

If you love Liberty fabric as much as I do, another great place to buy it is Alice Caroline. They have so many different designs and even some that are exclusive to them. I've also got one of their wall hanging kits which I haven't made yet but it is beautiful and the instructions are very comprehensive. Their website is so inspiring because it is a cacophony of Liberty patterns and colour. They mainly sell Liberty Tana Lawn but they do often have other Liberty fabrics such as jersey, cord and the Liberty quilting cotton range. You can also find Alice Caroline at the Festival of Quilts each year.

A great place to buy general sewing tools like scissors, embroidery hoops, embroidery threads, kits and felt is Cloud Craft. This is a wonderful online shop and items are posted out very promptly. They have really good quality supplies for all your stitching needs, including lovely fabrics for cross stitch and embroidery. They are very reasonably priced and often have unusual tools like this hexagon magnetic needle minder pictured above, which I absolutely love! 

The final shop I want to share with you today is Rose Garden Patchwork. At Rose Garden Patchwork, they sell fabrics and haberdashery sourced from Japan so you can find some really unique items. The zips they sell are of a really excellent quality and I just love the overall style of everything they sell. Their fabrics are bright and colourful and excellent for quilting. Rose Garden Patchwork also sell some patterns designed by them and also some lovely Japanese craft books that are so inspiring. I hope you check out these independent businesses and that you love them as much as I do. What are your favourite online shops? Leave your favourites in the comments below. Happy sewing!

I'm sure it happens to us all at some point, and if you are anything like me, it can happen every couple of months. For a variety of reasons, you can lose the ability to create. Sometimes it can be down to hormones and how they affect us. Other times it can be as a result of external factors such as illness or the stress of daily life. Whatever the reason, feeling unable to create can be really frustrating and upsetting, especially when it is an important part of your life. Creating has such a powerful and positive impact on our mental wellbeing that when we go through these periods of of inability, we can feel really down as a result. 

When I hit one of these roadblocks, I feel listless, aimless and tired. My head is saying “sew something, whilst you have time!" but I don't seem able to motivate myself to focus on a project and nothing seems to inspire me. I try to look through the projects I am currently in the middle of to choose something to work on, but I cannot pick a project and I don't feel like doing anything.
I recognise that I have these moments every few months or so and I feel like it's something I have no control of. It creeps up on me and before I know it, I am in the middle of this internal battle over doing something I inherently love to do but for some unknown reason, cannot make myself do. Have you ever experienced this or something similar? 

In the past, I have battled with myself and it hasn't worked. I have also tried just waiting it out, choosing to watch TV in my spare time or focus on other jobs. This has left me feeling unproductive and even more frustrated at times. Recently, when I experienced a spell of difficulty, my husband suggested I find a really simple project to work on and led me to an old Cath Kidston book called Stitch. The book focuses on cross stitch and needlepoint designs, which by their nature, are simple, repetitive and rewarding to do. The book came with the materials to make a little zip pouch with a cross stitch design on the front, using soluble canvas and I gave it a go and managed to complete it in a couple of evenings. It was the perfect project to do because it didn't require any thinking. All I had to do was follow the simple instructions and along with the lovely, bright colours in the kit, it lifted me out of a creative rut and got me ready to sew again. Using soluble canvas was a lot of fun. The stitches turned out surprisingly neat so now I'm thinking of lots of other things that might need a bit of cross stitch on them to give me an excuse to do some more!
So if you ever find yourself stuck in a place where you feel you have lost your creative mojo, I suggest trying a really simple project to lift you out of it. If you have any other ideas for how to break out of creative block then please leave them in the comments. Happy sewing!