We featured a couple of lovely Snap Happy bags in our ad for the Quilting Arts Gifts issue. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the correct e-mail address for Rosemary at Stitchin’ Sisters. Please write to Rosemary Wissink at stitchinsis@aol.com to order Snap Happy patterns for yourself or your shop.

These are great little pouches that snap shut at the top. When I spoke with Rosemary on the phone, she said she now has a companion pattern for a larger version that can be used as a small purse.

Oh, my! We’re getting tons of inquiries about the new Mini Assortments and the Bosa Nova Bags pattern, so here’s the latest news.

The Mini Assortments arrived early last week and have been shipped to our retailers and distributors. The Bosa Nova Bags patterns arrived at the end of the day on Thursday. We started making shipments on Friday to distributors and a few retailers. So, they are on the way!

Where can you find them right away?

QuiltingArts.com, SewThankful.com, and LauraMurrayDesigns.com will all have the new items in hand by the end of this week for those of you who just can’t wait for your local shop to get an order. The new items may not be up on their sites just yet, but they should be shortly.

Shop Owners and Wholesale Customers can order directly from us (of course) or from Brewer Sewing and Quilting, Checker Distributors, EE Schenck, Embellishment Village, Notions Marketing, Petersen-Arne, and R&Z Quiltworks. Canadian shops can contact N Jefferson and A Great Notion. Australian shops can contact The Thread Studio.

I’ve been busy making bags for display at Houston. Here they are in blue and tan batiks that have been hiding in my closet for (many) years.

Have fun with the new products!  ~ Shelly

Looking for a better way to wrap a gift? Read on!

I decided to ban wrapping paper from my house a few years ago. Why buy expensive paper only to have it ripped up and thrown away after just one use? And why store the stuff when your family has declared a moratorium on gifts for the sake of gifts?  I don’t want you to think I’m a total Scrooge – I still enjoy giving gifts when I can find something truly beautiful and/or useful for my family. But wrapping paper? Hey, there has to be a better way!

I dusted off my sewing machine a couple of months ago and celebrated when it still worked. (Don’t laugh too hard — running a business does not leave much time for sewing…) After a few trips down the wrong path, I finally found a fast and easy way to assemble my new Bosa Nova Bags. Here’s a picture of my first successful attempt. This one got stitched, un-stitched, and re-stitched a few times, but it looks pretty good!

These wonderful little bags are made from two pieces of fabric, a few Lazy Girl Handy Tabs, some Steam-a-Seam 2 fusible web and a few (very few) seams. Fast, cute, functional. What more could I want? Well, if you must know, it would be lovely have someone else write those pesky instructions, but I digress…

To make great Bosa Nova Bags, you need a lining fabric with strong contrast to the cover fabric. With the seam allowances on the outside, the lining is an important part of your bag design. Be adventurous! Isn’t that lime green awesome? And check this out – even the bottom of the bag looks great!

Bosa Nova Bags are fun to make – and your gifts never looked so good! If you just can’t bear to part with them, make a bunch from your favorite fabrics and use them to hold your treasures. Here’s a photo of the new pattern.

I dug into my stash of hand-dyed fabric and used one of Diane Swallen’s water-color sripes for the Small bag. I painted the fabric for the Large and Tall bags with Artist’s Paintstiks and a couple of our Leaves rubbing plates. The Tall bag is perfect for a bottle of wine, and I included a section in the pattern to help you change the dimensions if you need to make a bag of a different size.

I have to admit that the pattern just went off to the printer. I keep telling myself that I won’t do this last-minute fire drill before Quilt Market, but it’s not working…  At any rate, the patterns should start showing up in retail stores at the end of October.

Now I’ve got to get started on the next pattern. Can you say “Cha Cha” bags? Or perhaps “Salsa” bags?

I just love having new products to announce! Our paintstik minis have been so popular that I worked with my paint company to put two special assortments together for you! It always seems like forever when I’m waiting for new products to come in the door, but I’ve been told that these are truly “on the way.” Now, as long as they didn’t send them on the scenic route… but you probably don’t want to hear our shipping stories.

The iridescent set was easy – we only had 15 colors to choose from along with the iridescent blender. With 51 colors in the matte line, choosing 15 for the set was a little more interesting.

I wanted you to have a full color wheel along with black, white and a couple of browns. Since I use the matte colors extensively for shading, I made sure that the set had a full range of dark values along with lighter and brighter colors. If you like to stencil with your paintstiks, this new Matte Mini Assortment is a keeper! The final list of colors includes 2 reds, orange, 2 yellows, 2 greens, 2 blues, purple, black, white, and 2 shades of brown. What a great collection!

With any luck, these sets will be in the hands of our retailers by the end of next week. Happy painting!