free motion fish mobile and book tour!

Today kicks off a blog book tour for my my new book Sew Wild- YIPEEE!!! And first stop is over at Sew Mama Sew today where I am sharing a creative and SUPER easy tutorial inspired by my book- for this free motion fish mobile that I made for the baby's room.

The mobile was actually inspired by a large whimsical ocean painting I have been working on for the last few months- I keep changing and tweaking it to get the colors right for the room (blues, greens and turquoise- no pink for our little girl!)

And I knew I just had to create a mobile made to compliment the painting.

Made from scraps of fabric and paper this project so easy to put your own twist on!

Head over to Sew Mama Sew for the complete tutorial and a chance to win a copy of Sew Wild!

And stay tuned for updates on the blog book tour :)

sew wild is almost here

My friends I am so excited because I just received an advance copy of my new book Sew Wild and I have been eagerly reading through it all (over and over again). Getting to hold a real copy in my hands is SO exciting because this book was a labor of love! Writing a book is hard but writing a book about sewing (even if it is about break the rules sewing) is REALLY, really labor intensive but so worth it when all is said and done.

The book looks amazing! It is shaped in a square and is 143 pages packed with all kinds of ideas and inspiration, techniques and projects.

And the best part is that is comes with a DVD of your truly demonstrating all kinds of additional concepts and techniques!

I will be sharing lots more as the release date gets closer (Aug 29th) and will also be offering some brand new online classes inspired by the book and blog tutorials that will hopefully get your inspired to start sewing wild!

For information and to order Sew Wild Visit-

Interweave Press

and of course any online book store

scrappy pillow

Using stamps to create your very own fabric is easy and a perfect way to make yardage of fabric with unique pattern to use in a multitude of projects. Since I love creating pillows (it is the easiest way to change things up) I set out to create a neutral/brown pillow for the couch with lots of texture and scraps of hand stamped fabric.

I always make my own stamps or find something unique to stamp with. Typically I use craft foam and cut out shapes and carve into the foam with a wood burning tool. I have found that craft foam is cheap, durable and really great to use with fabric ink and paint. In addition I always try and find unique object or simple things that I can use as a stamps to repeat pattern across the surface of fabric.

For my neutral pillow I started by creating a few different stamps- the first was large chevron inspired pattern.

For my background fabric I picked up a set of really soft linen napkins in a natural beige- I really like stamping on linen.

When I am creating fabric that will get washed I typically use screen printing ink or fabric paint that can be heat set and made washable. I used the screen printing ink to "ink up" my stamp by applying paint to the surface with a brush.

And then started stamping onto the linen surface- note it can be challenging to get a stamped pattern perfect and often I personally am not going for perfect (I like when areas are faded or there are little drops of paint).

I added gold to the surface, again with fabric paint (Jacquard- Lumiere) made to be heat set.

I created more stamps and made another surface of pattern again with fabric paint.

After my fabric was dry and heat set, I dove into my scrap bin which consists of scraps of my painted fabric and scraps of recycled fabric and I picked out additional pieces that were in the neutral and brown family.

I cut up my scraps into all sorts of different sizes and pinned then to the surface of quilt batting.

Now, this is where I am different from other sewers and quilters out there- I sew and quilt everything on the outside with all of my stitching. WHY? I actually love the way it looks- stitching is just another way to add more texture. I love the look of stitching so much that I often say that if I could wear my clothes inside out to show the stitched seams I would!

Soon, very soon (like in August!) in you will be able to read about this process in full detail in my new book- Sew Wild.

But basically I pin everything down and then go to town free motion sewing on top of everything- sewing it all to the surface of the batting.

I used this piece of quilted and stitched scraps to create the front to a simple pillow, using another linen napkin for the backing, I stuffed it and added it to my pillow collection :)