Other Cat Studio

This is a blank book I created for myself to test out some new techniques. It's a new size, about 9"x7", larger than any of the journals I have been making. Using my sewing machine, I started by making a patchwork of floral prints, mostly vintage fabrics (pillow cases and a muumuu!). I used fusible webbing and lightweight paper to turn the fabric into bookcloth, then I added topstiching (can I call it quilting?) in light blue and green. I pasted up the book, adding a yellow and pink floral Indian blockprint as the endpapers. I used light green waxed linen thread to do a longstitch/linkstitch binding, varying the length of the stitches on the different sections.

I received a commision to create a baby book for a little girl named Alana. I had a fat quarter of fabric in a pretty pink polka dot print so I made that into bookcloth. I used the sewing machine to stitch her name in pink thread, going over it a few times to make the lines thicker, before I pasted the cloth to the bookboard. The spine is reinforced with a lovely linen-weave Japanese bookcloth in a dusky shade of purple, and I finished it up with pink stitching on the spine. Pink, pink, pink! Click the thumbnail to see more photos.