decor8 discounts

Holly of Decor8 is kicking off two weeks of great discounts as of tomorrow, Monday November 3rd. Her sponsors will be offering discounts the first week and the second week shops that Holly has asked to participate will make their offers. Ideal time to start a little Xmas shopping!
(P.S. Volksfaden is participating, too!)

brigitte singh

Brigitte Singh travelled to Jaipur as a Parisian fine art student in 1980 to study Indian miniature painting.She became fascinated by Indian chintzes and their influence on 17th Century French Provencal textiles. Her passion for textile design led to the opening of her own studio in 1984. Her prints are both inspired by and taken directly from archive representations of the stylised motifs from the 17th to 19th Centuries of the Mughal Empire.
The fabrics are created by using hand carved wooden blocks in the traditional block printing method. It is a process requiring a great deal of skill with separate blocks being used for each different colour, the correct positioning of the block being judged by eye. A forty foot length of fabric can take up to an entire day to produce.
These are a few of her amazing prints. The entire Brigitte Singh collection can be found by Aleta in the UK.

happy halloween

Happy Halloween!
Here is one last Halloween tutorial for a bat finger puppet from soto softies via whipup.
Too cute.

black & white quilts

I have been looking online for some black and white quilt inspiration and here are some of the quilts that I found.The top quilt is from Eleanor McCain. I adore the stark simpilicity and the stron graphic statement this quilt makes.
The other three quilts are from Mary Lee Bendolph, one of the most prolific quilters of the Gee's Bend quilters. There is a book out now just about her quilts called "Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee's Quilts, and Beyond". She is one of the few Gee's Bend quilters who is still going strong and her quilts continue to amaze and inspire me. The book can be found at amazon.de and amazon.com.

polka dots

This would be my dream car. Polka dots and the Volkswagen Beetle are two absolute design classics in my book. Unfortunately I don't own a Beetle but I do have several new polka dots waiting for you here.

happy halloween

The photos above are from the Vintage Halloween Flickr pool and can be found here. Now the kid in the pumpkin suit isn't me but I wore something very similiar for years that my mom had made out of a pillowcase. Being the crafty mom that she was she dyed it orange, used one of her permamarkers for the face, made me a green stem felt hat and even got me green tights.
At some point I rebelled and she stayed up all night making me a clown costume, without a pattern! She made me a one piece clownsuit and a hat, and the thing is though, is that she had to cut up a sheet and hand draw the polka dots on it because she didn't have any fabric to use! Is that not awesome! What a mom!
Halloween is on the rise here, too, and so I thought I would post a list of Halloween tutorials I have found online. There are costume ideas, masks to download, decorations and all kinds of other goodies here. Have a scary, creepy happy halloween!

Halloween Costumes

Martha's Halloween Tips

Downloadable Skeleton

Free Halloween Embroidery Patterns

Halloween Crafts

Fairy Wings

Free Downloadable Halloween Masks

giveaway, new fabrics

First of all I wanted to tell you all to get over to true up as soon as possible and leave a comment in Kim's under Giveaway post! I am a regular reader and a sponsor of True up,(if you are a fabric fanatic, this blog is a must)and Kim is celebrating her first six month anniversary and to celebrate she has organized a fab giveaway. All you have to do is leave a comment about what you would like to see featured on true up. We decided that the Volksfaden giveaway makes more sense ecologically to confine it to European entries, it makes more sense to me to not send fabric that is coming over by boat from the USA back to the US by plane! So all you Europeans out there go over and enter and one of you may win a 50€ gift certificate from Volksfaden or a certificate from one of her other sponsors! You may,of course enter both giveaways!

Alot of new fabric and some old faves have arrived to Volksfaden over the past week. The long awaited Alexander Henry shipment with "Frida's Garden" great new pear prints form Robert Kaufman, organic cotton prints from Westfalenstoffe, Organic Solids from Pondicherry, India and some incredibly vivacious corduroys from Stenzo.

So if you have a minute, drop by!