I recently had the idea of printing postcards with a photo of one of my pieces on the front and the instructions and diagrams on the back. I thought these would be a lovely item to hand out at my classes in New York and also to include when anyone buys a kit.

Of course, I then promptly forgot all about it!

It came back to me yesterday lunchtime when I suddenly panicked that I am leaving for New York in a week and unless I got on with them ASAP there was no way they'd be here in time to take.

Cue me then spending 12 hours in front of the computer trying frantically to remember how to use In-Design (a publishing software I did a course on a few months ago) and rapdily create some diagrams and edit photos. There's nothing like panic to sharpen the mind!

As I had left it so late there was no way I would be able to come up with something new as the projects to feature - what was I to do?

A quick browse through my blog, and some of my boxes of beadwork, threw up lots of projects I had made over the years and either never written up or had only written up when I was working on the magazine and then never done any more with.

I had forgotten about so many of them and really enjoyed rooting through and seeing what there was (and what I used to do before geometrics took over my life!)

One of the main treats was finding all my old spiral rope samples.

This was a stitch I first learnt nine years ago and which I spent an awful lots of time playing around with. One of my main discoveries was the variation shown here where you use a simple technique to embellish the spiral as you go along and which you can vary to add lots of fringe.

I made so many variations on this theme all those years ago and am glad to say that I still wear some of them now.

It's years since I beaded any spiral rope- I'l have to get my seed beads out and have a go soon. I wonder how I can make it triangular...

As I worked over the hours, it soon became apparent that short, snappy instructions with few diagrams worked best, which helped me to narrow the choice down considerably.

The other project I chose was an arrow stitch lariat. This is nice and quick to explain, and bead, so I hope it works well on the cards.

In the end I just about had time to create two different ones and get my order in- fingers crossed the postcards arrive in time!