Stitchtastic Newsletters

Hi to all of you readers and stitchers, welcome to our bi-monthly newsletter. I hope this edition finds you well and hopefully enjoying some early summer sunshine. Do you find you stitch more or less during the summer? Opinions are divided on that topic, many stitchers are distracted by the garden when the weather improves, whereas others love to sit out and stitch.

Welcome to our now bi-monthly newsletter. I hope you didn't miss us too much last month, we were very busy at Stitch & Craft and Sewing for Pleasure and it's a good job we didn't try and squeeze in a newsletter as well. The shows were packed - very busy and full of enthusiastic stitchers and crafters of all sorts. Sewing for Pleasure is part of a group of shows, all hosted at the NEC at the same time, and customers can vists all of the shows with the one ticket so it was a crafting bonanza for all attending. I also had a bit of a look round during one of our quieter moments (tip - visit on Sunday, it's always a bit quieter) and as you can see from my photos, I had a fun half an hour visiting some of our fellow exhibitors.

In the last newsletter, I told you that February is a really busy month for us. Well, actually it's such a busy month that I didn't have a minute to write the newsletter! So my sincerest apologies for that, I hope you didn't miss it too much. On the same theme, we're so busy with orders etc nowadays that we've decided to reduce the newsletter releases to one every two months instead of one every month. We'll still give you lots of present and stitching ideas, but I'll try to be a bit earlier with special dates!

Welcome to 2012! OK, I have an admission to make. As we have a really busy Christmas time, just like a large number of you, visiting relatives etc, I decided to write the newsletter really early this month. So for me, right now, it isn't even Merry Christmas, never mind Happy New Year. I still have to go and wrap my presents! But at least it means you get all of the latest Stitchtastic news on time this month, and I can relax and enjoy the festive season. Anyway, I hope that Santa brought you everything you asked for. If he didn't, then you're in luck anyway, as you can take advantage of our big January sale....read on!

So December has finally arrived and hopefully you've started to at least think about your Christmas shopping. I have to admit, I have done all of mine online this year, as I drove past our local shopping centre, saw the horrendous queues of traffic, and decided not to visit there until February at the earliest! Online Christmas is the best invention since sliced bread (maybe I should have been more Christmassy there, but I couldn't think of a Christmassy alternative to sliced bread!

First of all, I'm sorry the newsletter is so late. I don't really know what happened, only that we had a very busy Knitting and Stitching show at Alexandra Palace and then had a quick holiday (if you came to the show, you'll see why we needed a holiday!) and then all of a sudden it's over a week into November and I haven't written the newsletter. So apologies everybody, but better late then never, so welcome to our November newsletter.

What a busy month! We've been busy preparing for the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace, London for the last couple of weeks. We've been designing, putting threads onto thread cards, chopping up fabric, shuffling papers and generally rushing about! We've now got one week left before we go to the show so it seems an ideal time to release our newsletter special on visit stitching shows.

After showcasing our new Kate Mawdsley by Stitchtastic range last month, I'm delighted to be able to unveil our third new designer for 2011, Ann Edwards. If you like what you see in this newsletter, why not come and see us at the Knitting and Stitching Show, Alexandra Palace, London between the 6th and 9th of October. We'll be displaying all of our new designs (which I'm frantically stitching as we speak!) and we'll have some special offers available, especially for newsletter subscribers. More on the show next month.

Last month I said I was keeping our new designers under wraps for a little longer.....well, the wraps are off! This month I'm featuring one of our new designers, with the other one following next month. Kate Mawdsley's designs have joined the Stitchtastic range, her wonderful artwork has graced many a high street store and we've picked some of her cutest designs for you to stitch, with 2 mini-ranges to choose from. Read on to help you with your choice, or why not stitch all of them!

Happy Summer! It must be by now, mustn't it? The year is flying by as always and here at Stitchtastic 2011 is the year of new designs for us. We've got some fantastic new artists who've come on board at Stitchtastic to create some brilliant new kits for you to try, but I'm keeping some of them under wraps for a month or two as they're not ready! However, this month we have two more brand new designs from Patrick, our newest designer and resident computer expert.