I'm guest posting today on the Very Berry Handmade blog.  I've got some great tips and techniques on designing a fabric artist trading card, taking into account the thickness constraint and available materials.  You can read the full post here. 

Do you have a favorite ATC tip to share?  I'd love to hear.

I've got a neat project I've been working on for several months.  While experimenting with EPP ideas, I decided to try making a 3D geometric shape.  For my first attempt, I used equilateral triangles.  At first, I thought about making it into a small display bowl, but it morphed into an ornament.  I wrote a tutorial for it, which you can find over on Sew Mama Sew today.  The materials are pretty basic, and inexpensive since you need such small amounts.  After my success with this fairly basic design, I started trying out more complicated shapes.  You can see one of them in a picture below, but there are endless variations.  Have you ever tried 3D EPP before?  If you do, I'd love if you'd link to your project so I can check it out.

The town I grew up in is just a few miles from the city of Oxnard, a place with some of the deepest topsoil in the world, which makes it an ideal place for food production.  And one of their biggest crops is strawberries.  We all looked forward to the day when a flat of strawberries came home.  Everyone would happily pick through the plastic crates looking for the biggest, juiciest red berries.  I have many vivid memories of driving to one of the many farm stands to buy strawberries.  They were always a part of any event or celebration, even if we had to trek across several state lines to have them there.  So strawberries will always have a special place in my heart.  

Last month, hen I heard that the &Stitches blog was looking for guest posts for their Summer Blogging event, I jumped at the chance.  Now, you may be wondering what this has to do with my story about strawberries.  Well, after giving quite a bit of thought to what I wanted to write about for my guest post, I hit on the idea to write a tutorial on yarn embroidery.  The design I chose is a strawberry.  Although similar to the embroidered starfish patch I made a year ago, this patch is embellished with some three-dimensional woven embroidery.  Here are a couple pictures of the finished project, but you can hop on over to the tutorial post to find out how to make one of your own.

I'm excited to have a tutorial over on Sew Mama Sew today.  

I started my journey into English paper piecing with hexagons.  As one of the few regular polygons that can tessellate all on its own, hexagons can be used to create many interesting designs.  But there is a limit to the type of designs you can make with them.  One day, as I was meditatively basting and sewing hexagons together, I started thinking about how I could make my own more complex designs.  Rather than starting from scratch, I decided to adapt a design I found in a geometric coloring book.  It's a simple technique that anyone can use to create interesting English Paper Piecing patterns that are unique to their taste and skill level.  I had lots of fun making this one here.  I've got a few more units in process, but I love how it looks so far.  I learned so much about EPP, such as what type of angles work well, how to get the fussy cutting just right, and how to line up seams.  But that's a post for another day.  In the meantime, head on over to Sew Mama Sew to read my tutorial on how to make your own EPP designs.  I'd love to see what you make.  Tag me on Instagram or send me a tweet so I can take a look.