I did a little more stitching on the machine cut back applique this morning before work. Then when I had a few minutes, I cut back the layers of organza.

Here is the piece after I cut back on the right side around the organic shapes I had sewn. It’s pretty dull and those really light blue lines bother me. The look white and they stick out. I thought perhaps the dark stitching would knock them back a bit but that just didn’t do it.

So I added some Inktense pencil and marker. It still isn’t doing much for me but the white stitching lines are gone. The colors are a little more exciting. I need to add some more dark blue. I guess I’ll do that on that unstitched part on the left. I still have another one of these to do and I think I’m going to go into an entirely different direction with that one.

I’m still working on my stitch homework. This is a piece I started in class and I had a few minutes this morning to add some more stitching.

I added the dark blue stitching this morning. I’m not sure it adds much but I need to keep adding to this one.

I stitched my book together today. It was a little fiddly getting the edges together and it would have been better if I had made the binding pieces a bit wider.

 This is the book from the front. It seems a bit weird and wonky to me. I’m not sure that the orange really fits in with the other pages that don’t have orange but “it’s just a sample”.

Here’s the second page. It is cut shorter than the rest of the pages.

 Here’s the third page. Now that I look at it, I was planning on it being the other way around. Oh well.

 Here’s the fourth page and I do like the fairly dark page behind showing through the holes.

 And the last page.

 Here’s how it looks from the top. The pages are really pretty stiff due to all the stitching.

And here’s the binding. As you can see, it’s a bit wonky as well. That’s a big part of my stitch homework completed!

Today I worked on my last two pages of my machine stitched book and started on the binding. I also picked up some wool from my friend Paula that she is donating for the yurt project. I will take it with me tomorrow with the rest of the wool to the mill to be processed.

Here is the page that I showed you yesterday with all the drizzle stitch completed.

 You can see that the zigzag stitch draws the felt up quite a bit. That is one of the reasons that I did the stitches in the vertical direction. I knew I was going to add satin stitch in the other direction and I hoped the two would counteract the forces of the stitching to prevent too much buckling.

 Here is the finished page after I added satin stitch lines. The edge definitely got a little stretched with satin stitch. The felt is just not quite stiff enough to hold up to that type of edging.

 Here is the second page I worked on. I decided to cut this one down a bit as all the pages are different sizes in the book. This one is mainly cable stitch done with automatic stitches. I really like the bold line of the cable stitch.

 I got a little off on one of my rows and decided I didn’t like it. So I cut it out of the middle and rejoined the two pieces by butting them up together and stitching with a joining stitch. Now I have a folding page! This started all kinds of possibilities roaming in my brain.

 I got one “decorated” but still have the others to finish.

 When I went to take some photos by the window, this is what I found. A lovely shadow from the lace curtains. I might have to use this in Photoshop as a background layer for something.