Summer seems to have arrived at last! At least I’ve got my first sunburn of the year – the consequence of falling asleep on the lawn last Saturday. I have some interestingly shaped patches of red skin now, but it was really very relaxing, dozing in the sunshine with the sound of birds and the smell of grass and all that. Add to that a lovely walk along the canal followed by a drink at a canal-side pub before dinner, and seeing an alpaca being born during our Ladies Walk in the morning, and it all adds up to a very pleasant weekend. I even managed to get the pile of 100+ skeins waiting to be bobbinated down to 18, which I hope to do at my stitching group this afternoon.

Hoever, that is not what I set out to write about. Some time ago I showed you the foam purses and notebooks I bought from Yellow Moon, and a bit later the purses adorned with Art of the Needle. This gave me a taste for foam, so to speak, and browsing through the Yellow Moon catalogue I found all sorts of interesting items. Last Friday I received my parcel, containing lots of things to experiment with.

One of them was a set of foam blanks in the shape of flowers and butterflies. I got this mainly for the flowers, although as they turned out to be rather bigger than I thought it might be possible to decorate the butterflies with two small projects, one on each wing.

More practical (well, a little more practical) are the Christmas tree baubles and keyrings. The foam blanks attached to the keyrings are fairly large, but then that would just make them easier to find in your bag! Any stitching will have to be attached quite securely, though, as it will be handled a lot. Perhaps I’ll advise people to use them only for spare keys that live in a drawer or on a hall table … The baubles are glued on one side, so you push your photograph/artwork/stitching in from the unglued side and then glue it shut. These are perfect for mini designs, whether cut or uncut. I rummaged through my workbox and found a few minis I had done earlier (including the blackwork snowflake freebie), which turned out to be just the right size; I haven’t glued them in place yet, but they give an idea of what is possible.

Finally I got something which was not quite the size I wanted, but I thought if I studied the kit I could then make my own from large sheets of foam with exactly the dimensions I want. These are Bible folders (they also come as book folders, with a bookworm design on them; the bag on top, by the way, is a selection of foam cross-shaped beads I got for our Church’s Sunday school), but of course they could equally well be needlework folders! Not, perhaps, with the supplied decorations, so they will be donated to our Sunday school together with the cross beads, but you get the idea: sew a folder out of foam, using cord or perle or whatever, with a slit to take the tip of the flap to close it, and decorate the other side with a piece of needlework (either sewn or stuck on, hemmed or buttonholed or with a frayed edge), and hey presto, a folder to keep your finished projects in before turning them into framed decorations or useful objects. Or you could keep charts in it, or even the threads and fabric for a project-in-progress. if this one works, I’d like to create a folder with a gusset. If I do get round to it, you’ll see it on FoF!