Before I get carried away in my next exciting project, I thought I’d better tell you about the Fractured Skull Panel Pattern released on 1^st October 2020. No subtlety about it you can buy it here.

Flicking through Instagram one day in September I started seeing lots of Halloween sewing.  Being British, Halloween was not a huge thing as I was growing up.  But now I have little ones who love sweets and dressing up, I can’t resist indulging those angelic little faces, and Halloween has grown in popularity here in the UK anyway.

I started mulling over what I could design if I wanted to do something for Halloween but i was not getting excited about any of what i had come up with. At the time, I was developing a collection of simple fun blocks to release at the end of October (these are still in the pipeline but a bit delayed). Then it hit me pretty much halfway through September (I seem to do everything last minute!): how cool would a skull be in a grey scale?! (I may have been sitting on the toilet at the time.. as I have a postcard of Damian Hirst’s “For the Love of God” in my understairs loo… odd I know, but I had to hide it when my big girl was a toddler as she found it scary!)  But how? There was no way I would be able to achieve what was in my head – right?

I decided I would give myself a morning to have a play with the idea to see if I could make it work. Well I liked what I did so much so I posted it in my stories and yes, I was not biased, it really did look good! 

So for the next two days the kids got to watch TV (educational obviously) while I worked on the pattern and hubby worked to earn the money to buy my fabric. 🤣

I was so rusty on the computer using the free CAD and drawing software (both of which kept throwing tantrums) I had used for the Nice Iced Ring Pattern.  It took me all weekend to get the pattern worked out, labelled and printed.  On Monday morning the toddler and me hovered for an hour outside our local quilting shop waiting for them to open so I could get some suitable fabric to sew it myself.

We grabbed various shades of expensive grey fabric, legged it home so the toddler can be shoved in front of TV again (totally wasn’t educational TV either time) and I sewed until I couldn’t see straight.  I only made half the panel to test how it went together, what tweaks were needed, how long and how much fabric it took. Instructions got written and just a couple of days later I emailed it off to a few lovely people on Instagram who were willing to test it for me. 

So somehow I went from having the idea and giving it a go, to having a pattern, testing it, writing instructions (no mean feat for me), and sending it to a bunch of testers in just seven days!!!  

That weekend me and the hubby had our first kid-free days since before the toddler and thanks to lockdown we really needed it! I couldn’t help checking how my design was manifesting in other people’s hands (obviously I got told off by the hubster). BUT …. Look at what a fabulous job they did…

Where the time between then and now has gone I don’t know. I sewed a couple of samples myself and tried to get people as excited as me.  Well, it worked! I’m writing this sitting at the kitchen table (because I have discovered I can’t work next to the hubby in the study – he is too distracting) with more patterns sold than I could have imagined and about to start my first sew along with over 40 people signed up!! So exciting!