yellow Inchies

Today I could not resist working on something other than my very large quilt so I made a background of yellow which I used for my Yellow Inchies swap on the CChix Yahoo Group and I'm saving the rest to make colour circle pages for a swap I'm doing with Lenna. This definitely will be a lot of fun. Lenna has bought a load of circle albums, mailed them out to the participants of the swap who will make a multiple of 5 pages based on colour (choice of which one is ours) which we will mail back to her and which she will swap out in September so that we will all end up with a very colourful circle album. The sign-up is full but if you want to have a look at the pages when they come in to Lenna, you can follow the progress of this and other swaps organized by Lenna on http://creativeswaps.blogspot.com.

Anyway I left most of the yellow background till the circle album arrives with me and I can use one of the pages as a template for size. and today concentrated on making the yellow inchies. These have to be fabric, so I choose a yellow fabric, ironed it onto Fast2Fuse and then applied as many yellow threads and yarn as I could find onto it using some of my decorative machine stitches. Then cut them to size and sewed on brads or buttons (some Czech glass and other in the shape of tulips). Two of the buttons have shanks so they stand out a bit on the fabric which means my scanner focuses on them rather than the background, hence the poor quality of the scan!! Finally I ironed fabric onto the Fast2Fuse back and hand stitched around the edges. They look really summery and tone in perfectly with the daffodils outside which are at their very best at the moment, as are the yellow flowers of the mahonia which also smell gorgeously.

All our seeds are coming up in the potting shed and greenhouse which makes me feel even more that summer will be coming. We've planted nasturtiums, sweet peas, marigolds and tomatoes so far!