iphone case in Mollie Makes magazine

Mollie Makes magazine recently did a little article about the Society6 website and featured my "Owl in Ferns" iphone case! Yay! I recently uploaded some more iphone cases, ipad skins, and art prints to Society6 and thought I'd share them with you. Check'm out here. By the way...Society6 is offering free shipping through Sunday!

We Love French Knots

Hi all. Now that International Quilt Market is over, I'm attempting to get back on track with blogging again. One of the things that I missed telling you about was that in September Penguin & Fish was interviewed on the We Love French Knots blog run by the lovely Bari J! I designed a free pattern download of a little squirrel for the blog as well. The squirrels are going CRAZY outside right now prepping for the winter so I thought it was an appropriate time to share this little pattern again. Here is a link to We Love French Knots, please check it out! And here is a link to download the free squirrel embroidery pattern.

Fall Quilt Market 2011

Hi all! I'm back from Fall 2011 International Quilt Market. Quilt Market is a trade show for quilt shops and the rest of the industry to come on down and see what's new. There is one held in Spring and one in Fall. This was my fourth one, I can't believe it! I'm exhausted and could sleep for a week! It was an excellent show and I got to meet a ton of great peeps. Wasn't able to leave the booth very often, so I don't have many pics from the show, but I thought I'd share a couple from my booth. We hung Safari Sweet all over the walls. I think my favorite thing is all the little Safari Sweet plushies we made. I love the little alligator that's chilling with the big hedgehog. Silly. That's me in the booth in the first pic. That's only the first day and I looked tired already. On the wall with all the embroidery kits, you may spy some new little fellas. We now have the Giraffe, Jellyfish, Zebra and Alligator as kits! They're not up in the shop yet, but they will be soon. And all the patterns and kits now have iron-on transfers included, Yay!

Let's MEET and play with Safari SWEET!

Hi all. I have exciting news. My first fabric collection, Safari Sweet, IS NOW IN STORES! Yay! To celebrate, the lovely Nikol from Sewtropolis in Minneapolis, and I are having an embroidery get together on Saturday. We'll be stitching up little embroidered animal brooches like the one above. It's a super fun project and is especially good for kids or if you've never embroidered or sewn before. At Sewtropolis you'll also get to see a whole bunch of fun projects that you can make with Safari Sweet, like the giraffe quilt. I'll also be signing my children's book, No Monster Here. So come by on Saturday, it'll be SUPER FUN!

Saturday, October 1
1:00 - 3:00pm
Sewtropolis
5 West Diamond Lake Road
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55419

Society6

Hi all. Have you checked out Society6 yet? It's a super fun community website where you can post artwork. Then people can purchase art prints, laptop skins, iphone cases and more all with the art on it. There is so much fun art posted there, I'm tempted to fill my studio wall with different art prints. I signed up for a Society6 account a long time ago but just uploaded my first piece today. It's my Owl in Ferns embroidery that I made a while back. I ordered myself an iphone case with it on. Can't wait for it to arrive! If you want one too, here's a link to my Society6 page.

Hoop Up 2 swap

Hi all. I thought I'd share a project that I worked on during my hiatus from blog land over the holidays.

While scanning my Twitter last summer I found out that John (Quilt Dad) was going to have a "Hoop Up 2" embroidery swap. I thought the swap would be a fun way to make some new embroideries and meet some new peeps so I signed up. The way the swap worked was everyone would be placed into a group of about 5 people. Each person in the group comes up with their own theme for an embroidery. After everyone shares their theme, each person has to stitch an embroidery for every other swap partner in their group based on that partner's theme.

The theme that I chose was "Pretty Pets in Pretty Borders". I made a sample of my theme to share with the others in my group. You can see my process of the sample piece for my theme here and here. Above are pics of the embroideries I did based on my partner's themes. The "Owl in Laurel" is for John's (Quilt Dad) "whimsical woodland" theme. Lim's Cafe is for Amy's (badskirt) "retro or silly sign" theme. The Etch-a-Sketch is for Jill's (spinster sister) "Text + ?" theme, where Jill wanted us to have text plus something else in our embroideries. And the final piece is for Cara's (quiltnookgal) "Bluebirds with Tea" theme. I had such a good time stitching everyone's piece and it was a fun challenge to work within someone else's theme. Once I receive all my "Pretty Pets in Pretty Borders" from my group partners, I'll be sure to take some pics and share them. I'm so excited to see how they all turned out!

Another exciting thing about the swap was that it allowed me to develop my iron-on transfer Puppy embroidery patterns. I love when work and play collide!

Giveaway!!!!! My new patterns

Hi peeps! Man, this has been my busiest holiday season ever, which is awesome, but exhausting. Don't worry I'll be posting more regularly soon. The No Coast Craft-o-Rama went great this weekend. It was super fun hanging out with my crafty friends. I still have to clean up everything still (and from Quilt Market too) but I'll get there.

Thanks to everyone who's stuck with the bloggy blog during my lack of posting. I'm going to do a little giveaway for all y'all! I'll be giving away my 4 new printed patterns to one lucky reader. All of you who guessed alligator here were right, my first sewing pattern is the little alligator in the first two pics. He comes with a fold out template and a booklet of easy to follow instructions. The other 3 patterns are my new puppy embroidery patterns, Boston, Golden and Maltese. Each puppy is sitting in a pretty border. The best part is that the patterns include an iron on transfer, woo hoo!

To enter the giveaway just leave a comment below. I'll pick a name randomly on Monday. Then you'll still get the patterns before Christmas! All the patterns are available as printed patterns and as pdf downloads in my etsy shop. Thanks all! -alyssa

I'm in the Storque!

Check it out peeps. I was in an Etsy Storque article a couple of days ago! The lovely Linzee McCray wrote the piece about Textile Trends at the International Quilt Market. And one of those trends was embroidery, woo hoo! I got to chat with her about my embroidery kits and she took a pic of me with my big hedgehog pillow. You can read the entire article here.

Quilt Market post number 1 (finally!)

I'm FINALLY posting about Quilt Market. I'll be doing a couple of posts even though I didn't get that many photos, so stay tuned. Above are some pics from my booth. You can see my new products that I'll soon have up on my website and etsy. They are three little dog embroideries and an alligator toy sewing pattern. I'm super excited to start offering sewing patterns! I'd love suggestions on what animal you'd like a toy sewing pattern for next. I'm thinking a jellyfish might be fun, but I'm not sure yet. For the booth I took photos of the dog embroideries and printed them huge to hang on the wall, and people kept coming up to them because they thought I actually embroidered them that large. Heh heh. Now I totally want to. I think it'd be fun to have a big bedspread with one of the dog embroideries on it. I got to meet a bunch of my twitter/blog/store friends. I definitely had a great experience and can't wait till the Spring one in Salt Lake City. And my big news...I'll be doing a line a fabric with Clothworks that will be coming out next year. Eeeeeeeeee!!!!!! I'm so excited!

Where am I?

I've been super MIA lately, gah! I've been absolutely consumed with my preparations for the Fall Quilt Market. I'm super excited about my new products and I can't wait to share! I also have some fun bit of news to reveal as well, but it all has to wait until after I get back. To make up for my MIA-ness, I'm going to have a little giveaway right when I get back from Houston. More info on that to come. I sent my booth off to Quilt Mmarket on Friday and now I've been playing catch up with all the things that I put off while I was busy prepping. I stayed up way to late on Friday and Saturday frantically designing greeting cards for the manufacturer I work with, and yesterday was another late night working on some embroideries for an exciting new project. Again, I can't share all the info yet (annoying right) but here are a couple of sneak peaks of the two embroideries. I'm hoping to blog more regularly again after Quilt Market. Thanks to all of y'all who've been patient and stuck with me. :-) I'll be tweeting at Quilt Market, follow me here if you'd like all my updates.

New items in the store

Hi all! Just thought I'd share some new items I put up in the ol' etsy store yesterday. Three new bright Kitties, my book No Monster Here with a matching Monster embroidery pattern, and a printed pattern upgrade for the Animal Alphabet embroidery patterns. I think the monster book and embroidery pattern would make such a cute Halloween gift. I'm just saying, heh heh. Have a great Wednesday peeps!