Sweetbriar Sisters

Adorable Sewing Patterns

The Little Yellow Duck Project Launch

I am so excited to help announce The Little Yellow Duck Project on it's launch day!  It's founders have been working double time to get this very fun, and also super important awareness campaign moving and I was so lucky to be a part of it. A month or so ago I heard about an opportunity to design a pattern for an organization promoting organ, blood, tissue and bone marrow donation.  Since my ... View Post

Friday Fave: Top 2 Time Management Apps

  I finally gave into the Smart Phone Craze last Fall.  My pattern business had gotten big enough that I started receiving customer service questions all day long.  And packing my laptop with me to the grocery store just wasn't all that fun :) So, the phone plan was upgraded.  I'm not very good at doing anything half way, so once I took the dive I went all in.  After all, I'd just spent ... View Post

How to Give Your Handmade Project a More Professional Look

We recently talked about how paying attention to an item's  Visual Weight can help make your final products more beautiful.  I'd like to delve a little deeper into that concept. When a designer makes a product, he'll often pay attention to it's '3 reads'.  The first read will be the thing the viewer sees very first because it has the most visual weight. (If you have no idea what I'm talking ... View Post

Friday Faves: Reinforcing Patterns

A while back I wrote a post about how to reinforce your patterns by spray mounting them to card stock.  Just recently a lovely sewist shared her take on the idea and I loved her idea!  I just had to share. She mounts her patterns, just like I do.  But instead of mounting them on paper, she goes to Walmart and finds the cheap, $.98 place mats (she says she finds hers by the canning/kitchen ... View Post

How the First Rule of Design Can Affect Your Projects

One of the first things a designer learns is the idea of Visual Weight.  It can be applied to 2D design or 3D projects.  It's application is everywhere, and it is definitely important in the world of crafting. Visual weight is a way to measure how important something looks in a design.  An object with a strong visual weight naturally pulls our eyes towards it.  Here's an example. In the ... View Post

Friday Faves: Fabric Circle Cutters

I just had to share a product I've been drooling over.   This OLFA Rotary Circle Cutter works just like the compass you used back in Geometry class (you know, the one that had a pencil clipped to one end) except, instead of a pencil to draw the circle it's got a rotary blade to cut it out of fabric.  Oh man- can you imagine how nice this thing would be when you're doing raw edged ... View Post