Sunday Sampler

Earlier this week I showed you a sampler I was putting together.

Last year I spent almost a full year working my way through a book about Fabric Embellishing.  The posts tracking my explorations were the beginnings of what is now Serendipity Sunday.  At the time I was making the samples I had no thought of what to do with the finished pieces.  Most of them are fairly close to the same size – with a few notable exceptions – so the task of finishing them up was mostly pairing them up and adding a finished edge.

Then I decided to bind them together in a fabric book.  Well, that will work fine, except for that one piece that is much larger!  So I’ll make it the cover!  Now I need a back cover . . .

I printed a picture of the book and the dates and added some of the leftover sashiko embroidery.  At this point I realized that this should probably be the front cover.  Unfortunately, I’ve already started binding the pages together!  Oh well.

Speaking of binding – I chose a coptic stitch to attach them all.  When done correctly, it makes a neat chain stitch along the spine.  It does, however, take some practice and benefits from a little advanced planning.  Unfortunately, PLAN is a 4-letter word and rather scarce in my vocabulary!  But it was all a learning experience!

One thing I learned is that any stitched binding is probably going to be a lot easier if all the pages have the same kind of edge finish.  You can see here that I’ve used an envelop edge, satin stitch, ricrac, embroidered edge, top-stitching, and quilt-binding.  The two threads pass through inside the page twice in each direction.  That is really hard on some of these edgings!

But, I managed somehow, and I’m pleased with the result.  Most of the pages are from pieces I’ve already posted here – you can click on SSunday or fabric embellishing in the categories list to review.  Here are a couple that you might not have seen before: