Signed Copy Of Design*Sponge Book Giveaway + Softies for Mirabel Drawing Winners

Grace Bonney of Design*Sponge recently visited Spoonflower's hometown of Durham, North Carolina for a signing of her newly released Design*Sponge at Home book. Her many local fans (including quite a few of us from the Spoonflower crew) enjoyed a craft night and had the opportunity to meet the author at our nearby Anthropologie store. 

Enter using the link below for a chance to win a copy of the Design*Sponge at Home book signed by author Grace Bonney! We'll select a winner next Thursday, November 3rd. 

ENTER TO WIN THE DESIGN*SPONGE AT HOME BOOK 

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We also want to congratulate the winners of the Cut and Sew Plushie Pattern Giveaway To  Benefit Softies for Mirabel Foundation we posted last week! Mona G., Lulakiti on Spoonflower, from  Orlando, Florida, Jasmine G., Lillian H., Sabra S., Barbara W. of Poughkeepsie,  New York, Lisa T. of Abilene, Kansas, Rose M.  of Austin, Texas, Amelia R.,  NightGarden on Spoonflower, of Eugene, Oregon, Cathy P. of Akron, Ohio, Jennifer U., Veerle L., Patty Sloniger of Houston, Texas, Ping C., Sharee  F. of Austin, Texas, and Eve B. of Salt Lake City, Utah will all receive  cut and  sew patterns for soft toys like this one. 

The winners are invited to sew up the plushies and send them back to Spoonflower before November 23rd so we can ship the gifts on to Australia for the Softies for Mirabel annual Christmas Craft Appeal. If you didn't win this giveaway but are a kind-hearted crafter (or a crew of crafty friends who would like to host your own mini-drive)  who would like to sew a handmade toy and send it to the Mirabel Foundation, you can find details here.   

 

Enter to win a copy of "Growing Up Sew Liberated: Handmade Clothes & Projects for Your Creative Child" by Meg McElwee

We're excited to be hosting a book signing today at the Spoonflower office in Durham, NC, with Meg McElwee, a local blogger and the author of two terrific books: Sew Liberated and Growing Up Sew Liberated: Handmade Clothes & Projects for Your Creative Child. She'll be here at 10:30 am -- for those of you close by -- but for the rest of you we're holding an online drawing to give away a copy of Growing Up Sew Liberated, to be held at the end of Monday afternoon. 

SIGN UP FOR A CHANCE TO WIN GROWING UP SEW LIBERATED

Kanzashi crafting

Crafty young'uns
Originally uploaded by Secretsugar

I think of summer as my "indoor season." In mid-summer NC, it's just too darn hot to do anything but sit inside and sew. Apparently, my oldest daughter and her friend thought so too, it being a scorching 95 degrees even before lunch today. These two accompanied me to the Spoonflower office this morning and looked very cozy and crafty indeed, sitting on our sofa, checking out Diane Gilleland's new book, Kanzashi in Bloom, and sorting through pretty fabric bits.

Naturally, we have no shortage of fabric scraps lying around the house and the office, so it was a simple matter for my 11-year old to put together a cute little flower, following all Diane's excellent instructions on her own and wrangling the hot glue gun like a pro. No word on what the flower is going to be used for but it's cute, huh? New necklaces are next on our craft list, I think!

Hands

My good friend, Kat, recently turned me onto The Gentle Art of Domesticity, which is such a lovely, inspiring book that I look forward all day to my half hour of nighttime reading while nursing the baby to sleep.  This wonderful book is by Jane Brocket, the blogger behind yarnstorm, an equally well-photographed and inspiring blog.  I have to admit here that with my knitting block, I had previously assumed that this was a blog for knitters only and hadn't bothered to check it out.  Too bad for me!  This blog, and this book, are about nearly all the "gentle" arts of knitting, crochet, sewing, baking, quilting, and gardening.  Heavenly!

There are so many intriguing recipes (for rock buns, fairy cakes, homemade marshmallows...), countless gorgeous photographs, and lots of lovely essays.  One of the most striking to me was her piece on hands, a brief ode to their capability and competence.  While reading it, I remembered myself as a little girl all of a sudden.  I remembered the older women I knew then and admiring how weathered and worn and strong their hands looked.   I thought all those obvious veins and tendons and rough skin meant that those were hands that could do something, that were good at many things, probably.  And I couldn't wait til my own hands were so well-used and capable.

Looking at them now, my hands are pretty rough-looking.  For one thing, they're very dry.  Lotion smears up fabric and makes needles slippery, so I tend not to use it.  The sides of my fingers are stained with green food coloring from the Battenberg cake (from this book!) that I made and decorated yesterday.  My palms are calloused from recent digging and weeding in my garden.   All in all, these are not hands that would win me any hand-modeling contracts.

But they're the hands I've always wanted.

Awesome cloth book

Awhile back, I posted about the possibility of using Spoonflower to print up pages of cloth books "for babies of all ages."  (Esther K. Smith's words, not mine.)  Now, I'm not saying that I was responsible for Juliannmarie's totally awesome cloth book about a totally awesome sandwich, but I do want y'all to see it.  Click through her photostream to see all the adorable pages and see what I'm talking about.  I love this book!

One Yard Wonders

I was cruising around on some of your blogs today--feel free to let us know if you'd like your site to be added to this list, by the way--and ran across an exciting little tidbit on A Dress a Day.  Do y'all know about One Skein Wonders?  Here's where I have to admit that I did not know about this book, seeing as how I am totally knitting challenged.  But I do appreciate the concept a whole lot.  Sometimes you just need a little project between bigger projects, something quick and easy between big challenges, right?

Okay, getting to the exciting tidbit part here.  Authors Rebecca Yaker and Trish Hoskins are applying the concept to fabric and are currently soliciting your contributions for a book titled, One Yard Wonders.  How cool is that?  Read their guidelines and submit your ideas here.  And don't forget to sign up for their mailing list so you can find out about publication dates!