Inchies Galore

Today was a day for inchies and I made a special set of 10 so called fat inchies (i.e. instead of 1" square, these are 1.5" square) spurred on by a newsletter from Quilting Arts Magazine. They have offered to swap them for me at the Houston Quilt show as long as I enclose a stamped addressed envelope. I've got loads of US stamps thanks to all my swaps and it seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

Iused a background I made quite some time ago. Some of you might recognize it as the background for my winning postcard Forest Lovers.

It was made by ironing on a flower fabric onto one side of Fast2Fuse and then couching it with a variety of multi-coloured yarns of all sorts and descriptions. For the fat inchies I added a fabric image, chosed from my own vintage postcards, scanned into Photoshop and then printed out in a very small size on an adhesive cotton inkjet sheet (from Crafty Computer Paper), which means you can just cut them out and stick them onto anything. I cut the words from a very old and falling to bits fairytale book and rubbed the paper with pink metallics. I stitched the words and then beaded around the edges with multi-coloured beads. On some inchies the beads are shiny and on others matte. I could not decide which I liked best so did a bit of both.

A pink fabric was cut to 1.5" squares and ironed onto the other side of the Fast2Fuse and I finished the edges by satin stitching using a multi-coloured variegated thread.

If you find yourself at the Houston Quilt Show (1-4 November) you can swap with these on the Quilting Arts Magazine stand. Just wish I could be there in person but they will select 10 for me! Can't wait to see what will come back!

I also finished my Pink Inchies for a swap I'm hosting on the ATcards site. The background is a pink velvety fabric, which I layered with wadding (batting in US speak) and decorated with machine stitching. I added the transparencies of flowers (from Altered Pages) and added beading around the images. The edges were finished with overhand hand sewing.