I have finished my book (present for MIL). I have decided since I have run out of time to use the book for my June TIF challenge piece. It is made from my stash and as it is a book it is a story. The story includes my MIL’s past (what is) and positive affirmations for her future (what is possible) so it works.

I started with a white piece of felt that was felted with merino wool to cheesecloth (scrim). I then dyed it with yellow and blue acid dyes which I just squirted on.

Then I embellished with small bits of wool and cut out felt flowers with the needle felt machine. I then did the leaves and stems etc. with FME. It was quite bright compared to my pages so I felt I needed to tone it down and antique it a bit.

So I dyed the whole thing in tea. The flowers were a bit dim due to the tea.

So I added a bit of Dye-na-Flow paints to the flowers. I trimmed the edges and the whole cover piece measures 11″x18″. I added a lining and then satin stitched around the edges.

I added a “frog” type closure and here it is – the finished book, finally!

And here is the first page.

It’s been a while but it’s not because I haven’t been working on anything. I have been slaving away on the book I’m making. And finally, I have completed all the pages. These are samples of the pages – I haven’t included photos of them all as there are a total of 48 and some have personal photos of my m-i-l’s and so I didn’t include all of them. This first page is a “double” page as it is in the middle of a signature. She grew up in California.

I like how this pear turned out. It is stenciled and then has details added with oil pastels. There’s a quote at the top by A. Lincoln about pear trees and patience.

Here’s another stenciled one.

Hmmm… I seem to like the stenciled ones best.

This is one of the signatures with eight pages total. I have three for the total

This one had a doodle that was supposed to be paisley but I hated it and so I just covered it with brown paint and used the stencil again.

Here’s another double spread and this doodle looked alright.

I like the pages with the gold pen as it looks good on the dark backgrounds.

Another stenciled page.

This one uses a cut out form of a bird that I drew and then spray painted with black paint. I am really happy that these pages are now complete. It was a bit of a strain towards the end trying to think of what to put on all the pages. There are lots of quotes and inspirational words. Now on to making the cover.

I did start something for June TIF but now I think I’m going to use that for the cover of the book. Perhaps the book could be for June TIF as most of it came from my stash and it does tell a story. That’s probably cheating but I think I may have to go that way as work is getting busy for the summer tourist season, I’m starting Sharon B’s class on studio journals next week and my sister and her family are coming to stay for a month. So I’ll be very busy. Excuses, excuses….

Yesterday, a friend and I went to a quilt show in Missoula which is a two hour drive away. It was fun and we went out for a nice lunch after the show. I was hoping that there would be more art quilts there as the quilt shows around here are very traditional. But I was a bit disappointed. Oh well, I spent most of the time looking at all the free motion quilting and getting ideas.

Here’s the next step to complete the backgrounds for my book pages. I scraped various colors of paint on with a credit card. Very technical painting here =0)

Here’s a close up after the paint is applied.

Next I covered this with a coat of stain. I was supposed to use walnut ink but didn’t have any so I substituted walnut furniture stain. It worked fine. These are more brown in real life than the photo shows.

The next step was to add creme paint with grids and doilies.

Here’s a closeup of one of the pages at this point. Several more steps to go before the backgrounds are complete. Then I’m going to add photos, words, doodles, and stuff from two old magazines that I bought a couple of weeks ago – one is the Saturday Evening Post from 1950 and the other is a woman’s magazine from the 1930’s.

Just a quick post to show you this sketch I did of my friend’s teapot.