Stitching

I have been sewing in my journal, both by hand and by machine. Since I have to avoid glues if I want to remain viable there will be a lot of stitching in this journal!

I discovered the work of Scott Smith in an autumn issue of Art Doll Quarterly. Amazing stuff. Of course his Halloween characters are what I like the best so I bought a set of his postcards. They're not something I want to part with but I wanted to do more than leave them in the envelope they came in. This journal seems like the perfect place for at least a couple of them. :- )

So here I have hand stitched one in place. The postcards are pretty stout so I used the sewing machine with an unthreaded needle to poke holes in both the card and the journal page. That made the hand work much easier to accomplish.

There was a narrow strip of the watercolor paper leftover when I created the pages for this journal. I folded on half of that narrow strip into thirds to create the mini pages in the photos below.

The spider image is actually a mini cupcake or truffle wrapper. I flattened it out and stitched it in place using the sewing machine.

Scott included one of his business cards with the postcards so I punched holes in it and tied it to the opposite page. Not sure what will go inbetween the business card and the spider. Oh, maybe that's the place for a web!

I've had to clear away the journal making supplies so I could do some piecing. I think I need to put the journal on the back burner for a bit, let things stew a while and see what new ideas bubble up. So I've been into my precut patches to sew up Shoo Fly and Hole in the Barn Door and Broken Dishes and Flying Geese. What you see below is about one day's worth.

At the end of my day yesterday this is what I had on the design wall:

That strippy bit off to the side is the first "block" for a new quilt idea I'm playing with. Hopefully there will be more of that soon!