Yo-Yo Madness Continues

My yo-yo pile continues to grow. Some of them got put to use yesterday. I made a new pincushion for myself. My old pincushion was about 6 years old and had eaten numerous needles over the years. Once the yo-yo pincushion was finished I gutted the old one in search of my long lost needles. There were 25 needle floating around in there!

Both the yo-yo's and the pincushion were made with inspiration from tutorials I found online.
Heather Bailey has a great tutorial on making yo-yo's by hand. This is my new favorite hand stitching hobby.
The pincushion tutorial can be found at CraftyPod. This site is really worth checking out. She has lots of tutorials and inspirational ideas.

The yo-yo's were hand stitched to the pincushion base after the base was stuffed and closed up. All of my yo-yo's measured about 3" across. The yo-yo's on the side I stitched together side-by-side with a 1/4" seam on the machine to fit the circumference of the pincushion base. I folded the tops and bottoms down while pinning them in place to hand stitch. Hand stitching is something I enjoy but is hard for me to get started doing. The level of satisfaction I get from hand stitching is greater than that of sewing with a machine. My machine still gets good use though!


I will be accepting emails all summer showing your yo-yo projects. Get 'em down here so we can all see 'em. thefadedstitch@yahoo.com

Here is a sample pillow I made this week. It's made from a nature panel set Mrs. Patti sells at Common Threads Quilt Shoppe. Let me know what you think.

Pinwheel Plus

Pretty pinwheels with charm squares. There is a very helpful tutorial online to make pinwheels with a pack of charm squares. The completed table topper measures 28" x 28". It's very busy. I think the pinwheel applique I did down the center helps to pull the whole thing together. The buttons were found buttons from a yard sale last weekend.

Here's the link to the pinwheel tutorial.


The charm squares came from RJR fabrics. This was from their Charlotte fabric line. Unfortunately it seems to be an older line of fabric. I finished the back with a Robert Kaufman fabric. One and a half yards was more than enough to finish the table topper and binding. I used some of the scraps to make a new pincushion that you will see in an upcoming post.