Hello everyone, and welcome to Handmade Monday. Handmade Monday is our weekly link up for handmade ideas, crafts and recipes. Creative bloggers can share their tutorials and projects and we can all check out all the ideas and get inspired.

Last week I shared some photos of the Festival of Quilts that I went to last weekend. My friend Kristen from Scrap Fabric Love has now published her video all about the event so if you would like to see A LOT more you can find that here: Visit to the Festival of Quilts

I had a crochet dilemma this week so I sought help on Instagram. I find the Instagram community really good for advice like this, people are happy to share their advice, thoughts and experience.

I’m making a small blanket and originally planned to do a simple block stitch in cream with a variegated colour changing yarn for the little stitches.

The left shows how far I’d got before I decided it just wasn’t going to work out for me. I just didn’t love it as much as I thought I would. After some advice and deliberation I’ve settled on a patchwork sort of approach where I’m going for a checkerboard effect with the block stitch squares mixed with other different granny square variations in between. I have loads of granny square patterns and they are pretty easy to adapt to make them come out at the same size as my block stitch squares, and finish with 27 stitches on each side so I do a join as you go.

I’m thinking I can sort out the slight twist on the block stitch squares by blocking when it’s finished. I’ll share progress on my Instagram and most likely here too.

Let’s check out the features from last week’s Handmade Monday.

Click through on the photos to see the original posts.

• Remember if you want to pin any of these ideas please make sure you click through via the photo to the original project.

My French Twist shared a lovely budget idea with us this week. I know you might only see a really cute dog in this photo but if you look closely there is also a really nice woven headboard in shot too!!!

Creatively Beth decorated this cute pencil tote bag, perfect for back to school.

Keeping it Real has made this knitted bag, it’s fully lined too so it won’t pull all out of shape as unlined knitted bags can do.

Congratulations to you all There is a "YAY I was featured" button over here if you want to add one to your blog.

A like on social media, a comment or share is an easy way for us all to help to support one another so please do take a moment to visit some of the other projects linked up this week. It’s not mandatory to be able to join in here, there’s no easy way to check if you did but it costs nothing but a few minutes of your time and is just a nice thing to do!

The rules for Handmade Monday are very simple:

• Did you make it? Yes - then yay! We'd love to see it

• Add the link to a specific post, not your main blog url

• You can link up to 3 posts each week but try to make sure it's not something that you've shared here before

• Mingle - visit some other links - comment - share - be social

HANDMADE MONDAY IS NOT A PLACE FOR SELLING SO NO LINKS TO ETSY OR OTHER SELLING PAGES, THEY WILL ALWAYS BE REMOVED. THANKS

If you are not sure of anything more details can be found here.

At Handmade Monday the links are shown in a random order so it’ll look different each time you pop by.

Julie