Love Love Love It!

I've finished putting together the Little Link Stitch book and can't believe how taken I am with it now that it is done. A bit like making a quilt, in that you may really like all the components, but sometimes when they come together in the finished product, it is more lovely than you anticipated. Here are the steps once the signatures were folded and put under weights.

Note how the fore edges of the signature extend past the eco print

There's no way around it; when you fold a stack of papers, there will always be some fore edge creep. In purchased books, that creep, where the middle paper's edge and all those surrounding it goes beyond the outer paper's edge, gets trimmed off for a smooth edged text block. In handmade books, it is often a matter of preference whether or not to trim the papers flush. If there's a cover which extends beyond the fore edge, one can definitely get away with not trimming, and I have done that on many of my books, more out of laziness than preference. But with this book, it was necessary to trim back those fore edges to be flush with the eco print wrapper.

When I folded the signatures inside of the eco prints, I alternated the ones with mixed media paper with the ones with sketching paper and chose which side of each eco print would be on the outside and in what order. Of course, when I took them out from under the weights, I found myself questioning the order of the eco prints and reshuffled them to this order. Lord knows I've done the same with my quilting choices.

Time to stitch. I measured off a length of the hand-spun hemp I've been using so often, knowing that the off-white would compliment this book well. I made the first passes to attach the first two signatures together, took one look and thought, no - this doesn't look right at all. Looking through my limited selection of waxed linen thread, I decided perhaps the white would work and I liked that so much more. Look at those near perfect stitches! Again, it was reminding me of quilting choices I was so sure about but not working as I suspected they would.

These pictures show the interplay of design of the eco prints from signature to signature. 

The closure is attached by looping around the center coptic stitch in the middle of the spine, adding a bead (or two) at the end and then wrapping around the book several times. Again, I thought I would use a dark brown leather shoelace but when laid across the book, it didn't look right at all. But peeking out from the same bowl of odds and ends was this lime green piece of raffia. No, I thought, surely not. But yes, surely yes when it was laid across the book. I never would have dreamed to use that color but it does pick up the green and yellow tones of the eco prints. Remembering how well those wood beads worked for the closure on the wine and beer notebook, I instinctively reached for them. But because I usually do check ALL my options, I searched through some larger beads in my collection. I used to frequent a bead shop on Water Street when I lived in Eau Claire WI, and since this was early in my beading experience, meaning I often didn't know what to buy from the wonderful array of choices, I took advantage of the discounted grab bags or scoops from a bin of odds and ends. So I'm sure that's where these two beads came from, although I have no idea what they are made of or why they are such odd shapes. But they have a hole through them that I could feed the raffia through so on they went. So pleased with how this came out. At 6 x 4 inches, I could see using this as a travel companion - a place to not only sketch but keep notes on where I went and what I saw.

I've also finished up that sketch of garbage trucks, having fun working with the Inktense pencils and a wet brush. I've not done much with the Inktense pencils since I got them long ago, just a little testing and experimenting on fabric. This seemed the perfect place to use them.