Our New Bimonthly Challenge - Sew Lux Stitch & Share

Happy Friday - can you believe it is July already!? 

If you're like me, you can really lose track of time checking out all the quilty, stitchy goodness in blogland and on Flickr!  I really enjoy seeing all the different projects and reading the back story/process to many of the them.  So, today I am introducing a new bimonthly challenge designed to get your creative juices flowing as well as to inspire each other with our projects.  Ready to play along?

Here are the details to our challenge - The Sew Lux Stitch & Share Challenge

• On the first of every other month (odd months), we will post a challenge theme.  This may be a technique that should be used or a concept to base your project around.
• If a technique is to be used in your project, we'll share a step-by-step tutorial within the first week of the month to show you what to do just in case the technique is new to you.
• On the 27th of the month, we'll put up a special post for you to link your projects to.  This is the time to share on your blog about what you made.  If you don't have a blog, you can link to a Flickr photo.  This will make it easy for us to check out everyone's projects!  (A Few Rules: Make sure your project and your post is specific to this challenge and is not a giveaway/promotional post.  We'd love for you to link back to the challenge post as well and visit the other participants' project posts.)
• Each month, we'll select a random winner from participants who link up their project to win a $20 gift certificate to sewluxfabric.com.  You must link your project by the last day of the month to be entered for the random winner drawing.

For our first challenge, we're just going to give you a theme ... SUMMER!  Make a project that is inspired by whatever summer means to you - it can be a block, a mug rug, a quilt, a bag, whatever - it just has to include fabric and be made by YOU! :-)

Here's a little project to get you thinking ...

This swatch book/notebook/journal cover was inspired by that strawberries fabric in the center - it just made me think of summer... fruit trifles, fresh berries, picnics, etc.  So, I chose some other prints that went along with that theme - and of course red and white picnic table cloths are classic so I built around red and white and green for grass.  I have fabrics with bugs too ... including ants!  You'd be hard pressed to have a picnic without a few uninvited ant guests. :-)  (I used the "Sketch Book Cover" pattern by Keyka Lou to create the cover.)

So, what you do think?  You wanna play along?  I sure hope you will! :-)

Happy Sewing :-)