Grow Your Blog

This year I am taking part in "Grow Your Blog" - I took quite a long time out of blogging last year so I feel that this is a good way to get back in the swing so to speak.  The blog hop is being organised by Vicki.

My name is Nicola and I live in Solihull, England.  I have been crafting and blogging for years sometimes in fits and starts, sometimes every day depending upon what is going on at home and how creative I am feeling.

I love most types of crafts, at present I am into hand sewing - for some strange reason hexagons are my latest passion and I am often sitting on the settee at night sewing up little hexagons for some project or another.  If I am not hand sewing in front of the tv I am knitting and my current passion for that is socks.

This is my favourite hexagon project so far:

it was done for a blog hop that I took part in August 2013.

My two main passions that I always return to though are papercrafting, for which I make items such as:

both of these are classes that I taught last year at my local Hobbycraft store.

I also love to sew and I hand/machine sew anything from quilts to bags to pin cushions to placemats, basically whatever I fancy making at the time!  Mostly I design all my own stuff but sometimes I do buy kits for the simplicity of sewing without too much thinking!  I love to take part in blog hops as I find this a great way to gain lots of inspiration and also showcase my own work.

This is one of my favourite quilts that I made last year, its big enough to fit on a double bed:

I can't blog any projects that I am currently working on as I am hosting an Eclectic Elements (that's the fabric used in the cog quilt above) blog hop in a couple of weeks time and I can't showcase my items early!

I have had various items published in scrapbooking, stamping and sewing magazines over the years and am lucky enough to have had everything that I have put forward to any publication published. An achievement I am very proud of!

I have recently started to make some YouTube videos, three of which are on my sidebar - in them I show you how to create an inked tag, take it a step further with stamping and also how to make 3d flowers.  I will be making some more videos in the near future too.

Here's a picture of me:

this was taken back in September 2012 and the reason I have a big cheesy grin on my face is because I am actually holding an olympic torch at my son's school! saying that I do usually have a cheesy grin on my face anyway!

Anyway that's enough about me for the moment, I am trying to keep this fairly short and sweet as I know we are all going to be reading a lot of blogs in the next few days!

Thanks for looking - patiently waiting for snow from Solihull