Kayte Terry has a lovely new craft book out from Chronicle, Applique Your Way — it’s just gorgeous.

She brought her fabulous crafty book tour through Portland last month and I was lucky enough to get a front-row seat!

She did a very cool event at Powell’s

Kayte reading from her introduction

and brought us the supplies to make our very own embroidered and appliqued Toadstool Ornaments from her book.

It was such a fun evening of hand-sewing and chatting with friends. Caitlin even invented a new edging-on-the-inside take on the blanket stitch — those lefties have super powers! (Hers is the cool one on the left, mine is the boring one on the right.)

Diane, Caitlin, Wendy and I finished our ornaments up and I snapped a quick picture. It was so amazing how different each little toadstool was, even made with the same colors of felt. Of the dozens of people crafting, no two handmade ornaments were exactly alike.

Kayte gave her sidekick Adam an embroidery 101 refresher…

and she even got the Powell’s employees crafting. They made great ornaments!

I loved the projects Kayte brought to show us. Seeing them in person totally inspired me to get started on my first applique project from her pretty collection — I’ll be posting photos of it over here in a few weeks (along with a book giveaway, yay) for an encore Applique Your Way review!

I was very honored to be one of the contributors to the book (my project uses one of my favorite motifs) and I will be sharing a bit more about that too.

Congratulations, Kayte!