Over the summer Sandra, who blogs at Wild Daffodil, started making twinchies. Twinchies are two inch squares of fabric which can then be embellished as you want. It’s surprising how much you can fit on a two inch square!

Sandra made a background by layering fabrics randomly on a calico background, before stitching lines over the pice to hold it all together. She then cut it up into 2″ squares and asked if anyone fancied stitching one or two. My hand went up straight away!

A couple of weeks later two twinchies arrived in the post, I put it in a safe place and there it sat until last weekend. I have to be honest and admit that was probably partly because when I first got them out the colours didn’t inspire me, I didn’t get any ideas jumping out…

At the weekend I was in the mood for ticking boxes, you know, the list of things you have to do with a time scale, so I got them out again and had another look. I got my trims drawer out too and started to get some ideas. I forgot to photo the first one before I started, but it was mainly the muted foliage pattern you can see behind. I found some looped trim which I got on my last trip to Hobbycraft (this is what happens when you have a £5 birthday voucher you have to spend!!) It made a rather nice flower and the colours worked perfectly. I drew a small circle with a silver gel pen just to give me a guide line, then stitched the loopy trim in a circle. I filled the centre with french knots and added a ric-rac stem. First twinchie complete!

The second one had three layers of fabrics, as the middle one was green and the bottom one had flowers on I decided it could be a landscape, here’s the twinchie before I started…

I added two scraps of lace from my trims drawer and started stitching. I decided to use fly-stitch – I remember Helen from Untangled Threads saying it was a great filler! I started with the green lace and some green and purple variegated thread. I did them varying heights and sizes, overlapped them and then repeated the exercise with the ecru lace at the bottom. I started off with a light beige and blue thread but it wasn’t so effective at first, I doubled my thread up and that helped…

I then decided to fill the green and purple strip with more fly-stitch, in one of my favourite blends which has dark purple, green and rust. I kept stitching until it was all nicely blended…

So here’s my two finished twinchies together, I’m pretty pleased with how they came out, so thanks Sandra for pushing me out of my comfort zone! They were fun to stitch and didn’t take long at all, seen as they’re only two inches square! They’re hopefully winging their way to Dorset at the moment.