Book with Blue Cover

I've had a stack of pages ready for book binding since November and now I've actually bound them at last. For the cover I used a hand painted, stamped and embroidered piece of fabric.

I had done a little hand embroidery but it was so stiff to stitch I decided to use the machine instead. The tension wasn't right but I quite liked the effect so I stuck with it.

I put pages together in groups of three before stitching.

The pages are a mixture of hand painted, printed art work, music, envelopes, maps etc

This was the book before covering with the fabric. I used the cover of an old hard backed diary for the end pieces.

The Blue Book - covers

I've been away to Budapest for a few days and very nice it was too. The weather was great too, not like here where it is cold, wet and miserable. I took over 240 photos while I was there, I may put some of them on flickr but not on this blog as I have to change the size of them.

As you can see I have more photos of the blue book mainly of the outer cover.

The covers are made from a draylon velvet fabric and I used a thick blue cord to bind the book together. I used different fabrics for the inner pages.

Below - The inside of the cover - these are recycled wipes which have been stamped/painted/stitched. There is also a shisha mirror with embroidery around it, this is a purchased stud.

Take a Stitch Tuesday and Crazy Patchwork Hand Bound Book

This weeks stitch for the Take a Stitch Tuesday challenge is Cloud Filling.

A friend showed me how to book bind last week, which I enjoyed and will do again. I finished the book ends by wrapping the boards with some crazy patchwork and hand embroidery. The book is quite floppy, but it is my first attempt and I now know to do it a lot tighter. [It is easy to open though which is handy for sketching etc] It is also my first attempt at hand embroidered crazy patchwork, although I have done machined crazy patchwork.