Keep on booking

Did some more work on the fabric book pages today - my friend Vicky, who is also doing the class had a great idea, which is to make the same colour pages facing pages rather than back and front, so I decided to do a single page (the purple one) to make the first page (presumably we will make a cover at some point during the class) and put the first brown page on the back of that, the have the next page with the other brown on the front, then the first blue on the back of it. That in turn will face the second blue page and so on.

So today I made the purple page, did some stitching on most of the pages I've made already (not the second blue one) and put two sets of pages together, complete with interfacing. I decided to use pelmet vilene/stiff interfacing between the pages rather than batting, so that the pages will "turn" better, and anyway, I am not quilting through the pages - it would take too much planning to get quilting that would work on both sides! So I'll add some decorative stitching before I put the interfacing in, and then just sew around the edges (and I've used some glue to keep the interfacing in place - tacky glue is my new best friend!)

I meant to say before that the class is with Lenna Andrews who does classes at joggles.com and other places, and it's very good so far - the first lesson was really long and thorough and nicely assembled with pictures. Lenna has been great about putting up with our particularly talkative group and answering questions (of which we have a lot!). If you like what I've been doing, I'd recommend taking this class - I'm sure it's only going to get better - some of the techniques we will be learning sound great fun (like doing our own image transfers onto fabric and other stuff). And by the way - dormouse, if you are reading this, thanks for your nice comment - I was going to respond personally, your email address doesn't show, so I can't...

Also sewing-wise today, I made some little Angelina sandwiches which I'll be using later this month to make postcards for a "January cheer" swap. Not sure quite what I am doing, but it will involve cutting shapes from the Angelina sandwiches and attaching them to some fabric, then quilting in a funky way. Probably they will be quite abstract, but I have to play around a bit and see what I like. More on that in the days to come.

And finally, the last thing I did was to help Olivia (DD2, age 7) work on her nine-patch quilt. She now has all 12 nine patch blocks sewn together, and we're beginning to think about borders. She's done all the sewing herself, though I did the rotary cutting and most of the ironing - she's beginning to do a little of that herself, though I'm still wary. She also did all the fabric selection herself, but you may have guessed that already!