Over the past year or so, more and more of Mabel’s kits have been given a bit of a makeover; they are now packed in sturdy recycleable cardboard boxes, and increasingly come with the design printed or drawn on the fabric so you can start stitching right away. The latest kits to receive this treatment are the two Shisha ones – the flower on blue fabric, and the tile on pale yellow.

After cutting the fabric into squares and ironing them all I realised that the dots on the blue fabric were not quite as visible as I would have liked them to be. They were there, and I could have left it to the individual stitcher to beef them up a bit if they wanted to, but I want our kits to be convenient and hassle-free, so I made a mug of tea (first things first) and set about accentuating 21 dots each on 48 pieces of fabric.

Now when I first designed these small Shisha projects, I tried several variations; one of them was the number of petals on the flower. 24 was too dense, 20 for some reason I never tried, but 16 and 12 both worked. The kit comes with the 12-petal version printed on the fabric and the 16-petal version as a transfer pattern in the instruction booklet, so you can try out both.

And here they are, the Shisha Flower kit and the Shisha Tile kit both for the first time with pre-printed fabric. Let me know what you think!