Little things

Well, I've been spending quite a bit of time this week teaching myself how to create a website banner in GIMP, and have just uploaded my 'new look' blog banner (see above).  My third post and I'm already giving this thing makeovers :-)  What do you think?  I'm pretty pleased with the result - it took several attempts and a lot of experimentation to get to this!  I found this blog post quite helpful for getting across the basics of cropping and resizing an image and adding text.

I also figured out how to download a lovely looking font from a free fonts website - http://www.dafont.com/ - it has some great fonts to choose from.  It's really surprisingly easy (once you've spent a couple of hours of frustration trying to figure it out!).  It is definitely good fun though.

Last week I spent some time working on a little sewing project - an appliqued mini-zip pouch - to give to a good friend for her birthday.  It was lots of fun and nice to do something quick and easy.

 
I added some cotton batting onto the back of each piece, to give it a nice padded feel.  The batting was then quilted on using a horizontal machine stitch.  Here is a 'work in progress' shot:

I love this flower-shaped applique design.  It is so simple and effective.  The design is known as an 'orange peel' block to quilters.  I am thinking of incorporating this block in my next quilt, it is so sweet.

Hope you are enjoying your week and finding a little bit of time to sew!