Blue and Brown Book

For the cover of this book I used some Chinese brocade, and the beading from my daughter’s shoe, which we got at Target. (I hope she’s learned that if you leave your shoes outside and they get ruined, mommy will cut them apart and use them for art.)  After I cut and pasted the different cloth scraps, I found that the edges were coming up, so I stitched over the whole thing wiht turquoise to coordinate the colors and help keep the fabric down.  I also found that the cloth I used was too small, so I ended up sewing on more cloth to the front and back.  The fatquarters were bound in the brown satin ribbon, and I thought the ribbon was the perfect cover for the bookmark.  The bead on the end is a glass bead I made in lampworking class.

One problem I had with this book is that the edges of the satin kept getting frayed.  That happened with another book I made, and I didn’t have a way to solve it.  But for Christmas I got a heat gun…I was lucky that the fabric wasn’t real silk, or it wouldn’t have worked, but the heat gun melted all those frayed bits perfectly.