Last weekend we ventured into Newtown and found a lovely new coffee shop at 413 King Street, called A Coffee & A Yarn. Great coffee, friendly service and some lovely knitting yarns. I especially liked the mulberry silk. And if you haven’t brought your own knitting and you’re just itching to knit a row or two then needles and yarn are provided on every table.

I’ll have to take my own knitting next time. I’ve undone two attempts at a designing a multicoloured Noro Kureyon jumper and now I’m sticking to a tried and true Kaffe Fasset Tunic pattern. I’ll try to take a photo soon to show you.

A Field Guide to Fabric Design by Kimberly Kight

Kimberly Kight, author of the popular blog True up, has written a really wonderful introduction to fabric design. If you’ve ever visited Spoonflower or Karma Kraft and thought you’d like to design your own fabric then this book teaches you everything you need to know.

Kimberly shows you how to design by hand and how to handle those pesky “repeats” as well as how to do it all in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. If, like me, you can’t afford such expensive software then she also shows you where to find free software that will do much the same thing.

Every so often throughout the book Kimberly has what she calls a “round table” where a host of famous fabric designers, including Amy Butler, Denise Schmidt, Jessica Moore and Tula Pink, answer how they face particular design challenges such as inspiration overload or designer’s block and more.

This book takes you from the very beginning with baby steps and lots of hand-holding as you learn about fabric types and their suitability for printing, design aspects, colour choices and printing options, right through to how to design using software, how to register your copyright, how to market your designs and more.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and I’m keen to give it a go myself. If you’re thinking of designing your own fabric this book is full of know-how as well as comprehensive lists of the resources you need to help you.

I got this book for review as an eBook and I have to say it displays very nicely on my iPad and that means it’s searchable too.

It’s published by C&T Publishing and is widely available online.

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago I have quite a bit to share. I think I told you that some my 2011 fabric orders had arrived. Want to see? The first pics are of my Shabby Fabrics order. The top fabric is a lovely lemon on white print (camera doesn’t do it justice) and the others are these gorgeous solids.

I’m really happy with the service from Shabby fabrics as I told you in an earlier post and as a copywriter and marketing consultant in my day job, I appreciate their marketing abililty. Their business card has all the regular quilt sizes with fabric quantities for the quilt and the binding on the back. What a great way to get you to keep their business card!. Well done ladies. Pity I’m on a fabric fast for 2012 I won’t be able to shop there for another 12 months.

I also got part of my order from Hancock’s recently too. All these lovely striped fabrics and a Sewline glue stick.

I’ll be interested to see how good that is as I’m unimpressed with the Sewline pen of which I have had two and both ended up breaking with leads stuck inside the mechanism.

And just in case you think all I’ve been doing is stroking fabric here’s a progress picture on the Copper Tray Pattern appliqué.

I thought I’d see how many projects I could make using up scraps. Here’s my first attempt. It’s a Quilted Breakfast in Bed Set - Coffee Plunger Cosy, Egg Cosy and Serviette Ring.

Once I had put the Press ‘n’ Seal onto the top fabric I chose my other fabrics.

The grey underneath will be the top fabric and the others will be the ones that peep through.

My next step was to place it on top of my light box and slide the fabric I planned to use for the centre underneath it.

Then I pinned, using my small appliqué pins, around the central design and through all three layers.

Then I flipped it over and clipped the fabric around the pinned area.  After that I used some YLI Basting Thread (thanks Sylvia) and sewed small running stitches along the red lines.

Once basted I clipped around the basted lines to within 1/4″ and then moved on to the next piece. Here’s a picture of the back of the project with what I’ve basted so far.

Can I ask a favour?

I have entered my Andalusian Tile Quilt in the Aurifil FaceBook competition. Can I ask you to pleas go and have a look and if you like it, to please vote for it? Thanks so much. The link is here.