Sew Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Christmas 2017

Warning: this book may get you hooked on paper piecing. It shares great stash and time-saving tips to help you make 16 festive blocks with the technique, which can be used to make eight home and gift projects - you'd need a workshop in the North Pole to get though all the possible combos.

* Sew magazine *

November 2017

If there's ever a time to inject a bit of fun and kitsch into your life, it's gotta be Christmas, right? In this jaunty little book, Mary Hertel encourages us to create our own festive goodies including a table topper, tree skirt and gift sack using 16 of her block designs.  These feature well-thought-out characters including Santa and Mrs Claus, a cheeky elf, Rudolph, a penguin, a polar bear, a gingerbread man and a snowman. Other blocks feature details such as a smartly wrapped present. Perfect for paper-piecing beginners, the blocks, once made can be mixed and matched to create your own take on the projects, offering lots of variations. Whilst the designs and styling are not going to be everyone's cup of tea- I know that the eight-year old me would have fainted with joy at the excitement of a placemat featuring Rudolph and a gift sack covered in polar bears, and cut to several decades later and my own kids moan that I won't even allow them to have tinsel! I bet Mary Hertel allows heaps of tinsel in her house.I think I need to lighten up... let me take a look at that gingerbread man block again.

* Popular Patchwork *

Fabulous fun design for Christmas. With a little ingenuity, these designs could be adapted to year round, in fact some of them are seasonal more than Christmas - gingerbread men and polar bears, lending this book great appeal. Work from scraps using paper piecing and cut as you sew. This book provides a variety of whimsical projects such as place mats, Christmas stockings, table runners and more that are suitable to create for your own home, or to solve the gift-giving at Christmas. 16 paper-pieced blocks are mix and match providing much scope for a personal touch. There are 8 holiday projects. Simple fun designs with clear instructions, including photographs.

* Yarnsandfabrics.co.