MIY March 17: Week 3 Prizes

We’re almost half way through already!! If you’ve only just discovered MIY March and want to play along, you can find all the details in this blog post.

Here are the fabulous sponsors of this week’s prize bundle:

• Vicki at Minerva Crafts
• Maggie at Textile Garden
• Elisalex at By Hand London

Feast your eyes on the bumper bundle you could win this Saturday…..

• Minerva – a £100 fabric hamper
• Textile Garden – a £30 voucher to spend online
• By Hand London – your choice of 3 PDF patterns.

Not bad eh?! And this week’s Prize Day is open internationally. Off you go, get snapping and posting!

MIY Skirts Winner!!

It was close, but Jenny aka @thewardrobearchitect on Instagram was voted the winner of my skirt competition!!!

She did an amazing job with this image and I think that amount of effort is a worthy winner, but a huge thanks to everyone who took part. I was genuinely bowled over by the response both in the creativity and effort put into the entries and the enthusiasm shown by the literally hundreds of people who voted for the winner.

Jenny wins an amazing bundle of sewing prizes worth over £500 from Janome Ernest Wright & Son Faberwood Fabrics Beyond Measure Textile Garden Ditto Fabrics and Love Sewing Magazine.

Inspiration For Your Entries to my Skirt Book Competition

It’s the weekend, get your skirt on, get out your camera and get snapping your entry for my huge skirt competition announced this week with over £500 of sewing goodies up for grabs!!!

To get you started here’s a fantastic selection of skirts from the team at Cico Books. Inspired? You can do this!!

Full details on how to enter, what’s included in the prize and deadlines are here.

I’m looking forward to seeing your pictures!!

Beginner’s Guide to Making Skirts Competition

OK, “A Beginner’s Guide to Making Skirts” is out today and yesterday I promised you a competition.

Well here it is, a competition to win everything you need to start making your own beautiful unique handmade skirts. A MASSIVE dressmaking bundle of treasure worth OVER £500!!!

Fancy it?

Here’s what’s included:

• Janome 525S Sewist sewing machine (worth £250)
• complete dressmaker’s set of 5 handmade scissors from Ernest Wright & Son including; 8″ dressmaker’s shears, thread snips, antique stork embroidery scissors, buttonhole scissors and appliqué scissors (worth £155)
• fabric voucher from Faberwood Fabrics for 2m of fabric of your choice (worth up to £55)
• one of Beyond Measure‘s beautiful hand turned wood pincushions and a pack of Hiroshima Tulip pins (worth £34.50)
• £30 voucher to spend at Textile Garden
• £25 voucher to spend at Ditto Fabrics
• 3 month subscription to Love Sewing Magazine (worth £18)
• signed copy of “A Beginner’s Guide to Making Skirts” (worth £14.99).

So, here’s what I want you to do to be in with a chance of winning. It’s not a “names out of a hat / winners picked at random” competition, this is a creative challenge and I want you to have a bit of fun and also do some work for it! More importantly, I want this amazing prize to go to a winner who is really into sewing (or wants to be) and not a professional competition entrant. So, here goes:

• using the photograph on the cover of the book as inspiration, create your own version and share it on social media tagging me and Cico Books and using the #miyskirts hashtag on whatever platform you use,
• you can use bought skirts / skirts you want to make / skirts you have already made,
• enter on any social media platform: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest,
• you must be following me and Cico books on whichever platform you choose to enter on, you can enter on multiple platforms but must be following me and Cico on each platform on which you enter, our social media links are below,
• closing date is Monday 14th November to post your photos, I’ll then choose a final 4 for the online sewing community to choose a winner to be announced 2 weeks later on Monday 28th November
• sadly this competition is only open to UK entrants, I will be running another competition after Christmas which will be open worldwide so watch out for that.

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS TO USE:

Instagram: @thatwendyward @cicobooks

Facebook: @makeityourselfcollection @CICObooks

Twitter: @thatwendyward @cicobooks

Pinterest: @thatwendyward @rpscicobooks

Good luck, but most importantly, enjoy the challenge!

A huge thank you to all the people who have so generously sponsored this competition: the team at Cico books, Deborah at Janome UK, Nick at Ernest Wright & Son, Fiona and Brian at Faberwood, Grace at Beyond Measure, Maggie at Textile Garden, Gill at Ditto Fabrics and Amy at Love Sewing magazine.

MIY March 16 – Week 2 Round Up!

I need a time machine, I can’t believe another week has slipped by. It was another inspiring week of MIY March though and there are now almost 3300 #miymarch16 photos on Instagram. We’re taking over, I love it!!

Week 2’s themes covered everything from sewing heroes, peeping inside people’s sewing zones and embracing everything slow, here were mine and Emma’s top picks from each day (I have to admit this task gets harder every time as there are more and more great pictures to choose from):

DAY 7 – SEW & STYLE HEROES – what a varied bunch!

DAY 8 – SEW ZONE – a nosey peek behind the scenes of all those sewing spaces….

DAY 9 – SLEEVES – the humble sleeve in all its varied forms.

DAY 10 – TROUSERS OR PANTS? – in celebration of the worldwide and hilarious confusions this can cause!

DAY 11 – HOLD IT TOGETHER – our second Prizeday Friday sponsored by Textile Garden, this time 2 of these top 4 picks were the lucky winners of a voucher to spend on beautiful buttons and notions from Maggie.

DAY 12 – PRINT

And DAY 13 – SLOW – one of my favourites so far and something I plan to do more of this year.

Now how can you fail to be inspired by that lot?! If you’re feeling inspired enough to join in follow me @thatwendyward and Emma @dressmakerssocial on Instagram. Full details on how to join in are in this post.

As an added incentive, this week’s Prizeday Friday is from Ernest Wright & Son….!

Missed Week 1? It’s here.

MIY March is Back!!

Did you take part in MIY March last year?

If so, I hope you’ll be joining myself and Emma again and if not, you need to join in this year! MIY March (aka make-it-yourself March) is bigger and better for 2016, I’ve got 5 amazing sponsors offering some great prizes for each week during March.

Most of the prizes will be available internationally, but some will only be open to the UK, I’ll make that clear when I post that day’s topic.

Here’s the list of daily topics to whet your appetite and start planning your pictures, get thinking!

Here’s how to join in:

• everyday in March post a sewing themed photo to Instagram inspired by the daily topic from the list above, I will post a topic reminder each morning
• use the hashtag #miymarch16 in the caption of your picture
• follow me @thatwendyward and Emma @dressmakerssocial so that you know each day’s theme and can check out our daily top 4 and Prizeday Friday winners
• everyday myself and Emma will choose our favourite 4 pictures to share and repost with you all
• on Prizeday Fridays you will also need to follow the sponsor to enter and the sponsor will choose their winner from our favourite 4
• Prizeday Friday winners will be announced on Monday morning of the following week
• if your account is set to “private” no-one will be able to see your pics so you won’t be able to join in!

So, what’s not to like? Exercise your little grey cells, meet like-minded people from around the world, win prizes and get inspired!

If you’re not already on Instagram there is lots of help for how to set up your account and how to use Instagram here.

Look forward to meeting you!!