Is fox safe? | Maria | Sewing

Hello everyone!

Maria here today and welcome once again to the UK Scrap Addicts blog. I hope you are enjoying all the inspiration and creativity! I certainly am!

This month it is all about sewing. I will tell you a tiny secret... I have only been hand-stitching on my layouts for about three months, and even though I own a sewing machine, I still haven't had the guts to take it to paper! Before I started hand-stitching, "faux stitching" was all the rage for me. I added it to quite a few of my projects! It's so simple and quick, but effective too!

For today's layout I have used these two techniques, faux and hand-stitching. As you will be able to see in the video below, making the wholes for the hand stitching was pretty straight forward using the paper piercing guide. I thought this was the best solution for what I wanted to do, as it was a curved shaped. Had it been a straight line, I would have probably just used a ruler to guide me.

The actual hand stitching takes a tiny bit of time, but nothing that will put me off. I made a layout recently where I hand stiched lots of sun rays and that took a while! But this one didn't take too long. Just get comfy in your chair, sit back and stitch whilst you're watching something on the telly or on youtube :)

I was actually quite inspired by the sketch that I used (you can find it here) and I didn't faff too much trying to decide what to do, which is quite uncommon for me! I used an old Studio Calico collection called Snippets for my papers. The embellishments are a mixture of Pink Paislee, Shimelle's Little by Little and stickers and enamels from my stash, The Thickers in the title are from Amy Tangarine's Follow.

I have also used Heidi Swapp Color Shine and Mr Hueys for my splatters, and a bit of watercolour too, to bring the blue from the thickers and the fox pattern paper, as I don't have ink sprays in that colour.

And one more close up below showing my faux stitching. The beauty of faux stitching is that you can use any colour pen to match your colour scheme, or even change the design! You can do short lines, or long lines, or even a mixture of lines and dots if that's what you fancy. Some people use a ruler for a straight design, and others do it by hand, giving it a more DIY look. No rules!

Please pop over our YouTube channel and watch my first process video!

Read you soon!