I can hardly believe it but it’s the end of the first quarter and the final day of my Daily Dose of Fiber Challenge. I have really enjoyed the challenge and learned that I need to work on a reliable method of posting while I’m traveling. I guess I’m just not a mobile kind of girl. But I did get a lot accomplished this first quarter. You can see my post about it on the Felting and Fiber Studio.

 Today I laced the print to stitch lichen piece around a card.

And then mounted it to matte board. I probably won’t get a frame for this one as it is quite small, only 3 1/4″ x 4 1/2″. It was a little tougher to lace this one because it had a couple of layers of batting under it so there was a lot of extra layers especially at the corners.

I was volunteering at Brewfest all day today so I didn’t have much time for fiber. But I did manage to get one of my small pieces ready to lace around a card for presentation. I will lace it up tomorrow and then mount it onto matt board.

 Here’s the front, all pinned and ready to go.

And this is the back. I”ll use the strings to attach the piece to matt board.

I spent most of the morning trying to figure out why the computer at the store won’t load our new store website. Still haven’t gotten it worked out. This afternoon, I met with Paula at Camas Creek Yarn and we figured out the supplies that need to be packaged up for our felting classes in June. The supplies are going to be included in the class fee but we had designated $15 for supply packs. Luckily that gets you quite a bit of fiber in various forms. Once we got that worked out, I went to Budget Framing to get a piece of matte board for my Kantha bird. They were so nice there and actually just gave me the matte board since it was a small piece.

 And here he is, attached to his matte board and looking happy. Now all I need to do is find a 10″x 10″ square frame. Hopefully, I can find a plain black one in that size. Tomorrow, I’m off to work at Brewfest up on Big Mountain which is a fund raiser for the SNOW Bus. If you’re in the area, it’s a really fun event and you get to drink lots of microbrews from Montana. I never drink any beer but I still have fun.

I stitched and stitched on the machine cut back applique piece. Now I have to decide if it is finished. I still think it needs something else but I’m going to leave it for a few days and see what I think then.

I used several different more shades of orange and a few that were pink. Looking at the photo now, it needs more dark lines I think.

I decided to try another book cover with the Italian insertion stitch binding. Unfortunately, I was in a hurry this morning and forgot to fold over the edges of the binding so I just decided to try it without the folded edge. It actually works fine except now I’m not sure how I will attach pages inside. But I’ll work something out.

Do you ever think that after learning a new stitch, “that was easy, I’ll remember that one”? That was what I thought about Italian insertion stitch but the beginning still looks crappy. Once I got started, it was fine except for a little tension issue where I kept pulling a little tighter and tighter but that’s not really noticeable once it is off the card. But I still always need to look back at instructions to remember how to start a stitch that I haven’t done for a while or that is relatively new to me.

Here’s a closer view once I got going. You can see to the left that the stitches are getting pulled a little tighter because the space between the pages is getting smaller. I just have to remember this next time I do this stitch, that would be good if I had much of a memory left!