Category: book covers

Dear Diary

Last year I bought a diary, to help me plan my newly self-employed activities for the year. I had great hopes for it. I planned to write down all the weird and wonderful national days, like National Kazoo Day and Inane Answering Message Day (28th and 30th January respectively, if you’re interested) or World Three-Legged Zombie Day (ok, that one’s yet to be confirmed).

birdie gets to work

I intended to plan and schedule blog posts, dyeing days, shop updates, accounts days, and lots of other things besides. It was a great plan.

Here’s a fairly typical diary page from this year:

blank. Of course I will recycle and reuse the paper.

It’s not that I have nothing to do.

It’s that I have So. Much. To. Do that I haven’t got time to write anything in the diary. I did fairly hit the ground running in January, and it’s been pretty much non-stop ever since, but it’s mostly reactive activity rather than planned activity. Fire-fighting is exhausting, and I see now that I do really need to set aside some time to plan things better. I’ve been so busy this year that I haven’t found the time (and if I’ve had the time then I haven’t had the energy) to make the art that I thought would be possible.

Next year I really must make time to use the diary for effective planning and scheduling, because all work and no play is no good for anyone. There are Skillshare classes I want to take. I want to become more proficient with Procreate. There are all kinds of messy mixed media avenues I want to explore. I want to make sketchbooks and draw more. I will schedule and ring-fence play times. All play and no work is no good either, of course. I will also schedule strategic planning meetings with myself and maybe even a weekly team meeting (can you be a team of one?) It’s a good plan. Let’s see if any of that works.

So I’ve bought another diary and next year I will try again. I will only use it for planning, not for writing my life story as it unfolds. It will be a purely administrative tool, holding and measuring time, and will let me see how I can use my time better.

All of the above has been a very lengthy – and probably very dull – prologue to the real content of this post. As you may know, I like to make covers for books. Just because. Making a slip cover for a book is quite quick and easy – you just need something long enough to wrap around the book and under the front/back covers and something an inch or so wider on each long side.

I placed a few scraps on a foundation cloth. The ragged vintage lace down the spine was exactly the length I needed. I always think if something fits exactly without needing to be cut or shaped, then it was probably meant to be there. The lines are fairly straight, but the photo is a bit crooked.

Diary cover

A little hand stitch here and there and it was soon done.

diary front cover (eco dyed leaf fabric from Jane Hunter Textiles)

I stencilled 2024 onto a piece of painted card and attached it by over-laying a scrap of sheer tulle that has little dots on it and just stitched around the edge:

diary front cover in progress

Once the stitching on the front, back, and spine is complete, you can turn the long edges down so that the height of the cover is about 1/4″ longer than the height of the book. I just tack the hem down with tiny stitches on the surface because you won’t really see the wrong side.

For the wrap-around edges, I usually just try the book cover on the book, wrong side outwards, folding the long sides around book and then closing the book to make sure it’s not too tight. I can then mark the outer edge with a pin and oversew along the top and bottom edges to create the slip case for the front and back covers. There are lots of other ways to do this. I’m sure there will be many tutorials online for making book covers like this one.

stitching the slip case

Turn everything right side out again and the book just slips nicely into the cover.

half in, half out
all in

I like it.

front cover
back cover

And there we are, fit for the future. I can see next year coming and I’ll be ready for it.

2024

Running stitch

I’m continuing with the linen cover for this year’s stitch journal.

Running stitch on linen

I hardly ever do straight lines intentionally. I used masking tape to keep me on the straight and narrow. Initially I started with lines of running stitch to give some sort of structure on which to build something more complex. I was thinking maybe couching, or columns of embroidery, or whipped running stitch. If ever I don’t know what to do with a blank canvas, I generally find that making a start with running stitch takes it where it needs to go. And sometimes it turns out that running stitch is all it needs. I find I’m really liking the simplicity of it.

Running stitch – straight lines! Me?

Initially it was going to be just blue, but I’ve started adding some greens and some space-dyed threads that give a flash of colour here and there. I’m using fine-ish threads – nothing thicker than perle 12 – and mostly my own hand-dyed cotton and silk. I like the unpredictable subtle colour changes that you get with hand-dyed thread.

Running stitch lines

The title box is outlined with couched silk boucle. I’m not sure what the title will be yet. The heavyweight linen came from a vintage French shirt, and is difficult to stitch on – I have had to resort to a thimble, which I hardly ever use – but beautiful quality. I can’t imagine it having been a very comfortable shirt, but I think it will be a perfect journal cover.

New book, old cover

This week I’ve made a notebook using some light weight cotton rag paper – somewhere to collect colour palettes, swatches, and notes about colour.

Sketchbook page with colour notes

The paper signatures were easy enough – just folded pairs that could be stitched to the spine of a cover. The cover itself literally dropped through the letter box one day. I cut a corrugated cardboard mailer box to size and painted it white:

Free! Corrugated cardboard mailer cut down to size

The depth of the box turned out to be exactly the right size for a spine to fit the pile of signatures:

Signatures stitched to cardboard cover

I painted some abaca tissue paper with acrylic inks and collaged/stencilled it a bit and used that to cover the white cardboard. I’ve reinforced the spine with another layer of painted tissue.

Little book of colour (front)
Little book of colour (back)

You can still see the texture of corrugated cardboard underneath the colour but it’s functioning pretty well as a book.

Next job this week is to find a way through these, when they’re dry:

Hand dyed threads – it’s like waiting for thread to dry

If I can get through them all (and if I can stop myself from keeping them!) they’ll be available from next week.

Threads

While I’m waiting for more thread to arrive in the post, I’m compiling for myself a thread catalogue. This is really just somewhere for me to organise and categorise the various types of thread that I will be stocking and dyeing.

Handmade notebook, about 5” x 7”
Notebook, back cover – acrylic ink, Posca paint pens, various mark-making tools and textures

Initially this was just going to be a notebook and cover, but, well, these things often get a bit out of hand, and now it’s slightly more complicated than that.

Book wrap – couched threads and yarns on hand-dyed silk noil

The colour palette came about by accident, after I dyed these thick cotton boucle yarns, which will wrap around the whole thing to tie it shut:

Chunky cotton boucle yarns

I really like the way this very thick-and-thin dimensional cotton slub yarn can be flattened when it’s couched with long stitches:

Anyway, back to over-complicating things, and now it’s a notebook in a wraparound cover, with a pocket for index cards carrying samples and information about the various threads. The pocket came from a silk shirt that I dyed.

Wraparound book cover with notebook and pocket for index cards

I find it very useful to round up information for comparative purposes, so that I can see at a glance how (for instance) silk and cotton threads compare in terms of weight or thickness. Thread weights are sometimes given as an nm figure, which I don’t find particularly helpful. Broadly, this system translates as the number of meters per 1g of thread (the first number) and the number of plies or strands in the thread (the second number). So the silk thread pictured below has a nm of 8/2, which tells you it’s a 2-ply thread, and you get about 8 metres of it per gram. For comparison, standard sewing thread (the kind you would use in a machine) is usually something like 60 or 70/2, which is a lot finer. As a visual thinker, I find it much easier to picture thread weights in terms of wraps per inch – I’m not certain but I think this is a system that is more commonly seen in the knitting world, to help with substituting yarn weights in patterns. I find it much easier to understand that the silk thread below has about 23 wraps per inch (the number of times you can wrap it around a one-inch strip without leaving any gaps).

Silk thread wrapped around card, 23 wraps per inch

Finer silk threads, which have an nm of 16/2 and 30/2, have wraps per inch of about 29 and 44 respectively. I find this easier to visualise.

Thread index cards

I’m using commercial cotton perle threads as controls, just to see how the weights of my various hand-dyed threads will compare. And even that isn’t as ‘standard’ as you might expect. I’ve used DMC perle 3 to 8 to count wraps per inch, but I didn’t have enough DMC perle 12 so had to use a Valdani perle 12 instead. And here’s the surprise – there isn’t a huge amount of difference between DMC perle 8 (43 wpi) and Valdani perle 12 (44 wpi). I can see by enlarging the photos that the 12 card maybe isn’t wrapped as closely as the 8, but that would only account for another 3 or 4-ish.

Commercial cotton perle threads

This is turning into quite a rabbit hole, isn’t it? I expect somebody somewhere will tell me I’ve got too much time on my hands, but I find this kind of thing really fascinating. Ultimately I suspect this will end up being a self-referencing closed system that only I will understand, and I think that’s probably ok. As soon as thread reinforcements arrive, I’ll be able to start winding skeins for dyeing again – but in the meantime I’m enjoying some quite reasonable down time.

Matchmaking

I hope no one’s bored with book covers yet. I’m making a cover for a 12” square sketchbook – though I expect it will be more of a notebook, really, with drawings. Somewhere I can jot down ideas and designs for Red Bubble.

Book cover in progress

I’ve always enjoyed seeing red and turquoise together. It started me thinking about the concept of clashing colours, and I’m not sure that I agree there is such a thing. In my experience, you can generally put any two or three colours together and they will sit side by side fairly happily. Red seems to go with pretty much anything; so does purple. I think there is the potential for a problem when you put too many different colours together, but even then you can generally tone them down by adding some black and white.

Front cover, about 12” square

The main problem I’m having is trying to get an accurate photograph. If the red is right, the turquoise is wrong, and vice versa. Suffice to say the colours are richer and deeper in real life.

Moon flowers

The design initially started with the red circle, which is a piece of shot silk from an old sari layered over a circle of felt. I was going for a fairly obvious red bubble, but then the little flowers popped up and it’s turned into a kind of moon flower arrangement. These things happen. I find the thing that grows organically in its own way is usually better than the thing I was aiming for. You just have to trust the process sometimes. The turquoise background is pieced together using strips from the edge of a hand-dyed vintage tablecloth. You can see the creases, which formed the edge of the cloth where the fabric had been doubled. They won’t iron out, and in any case I quite like these scars from a previous life.

And then I found a piece of really ugly fabric. I don’t often have dye disasters, but this poor thing was definitely one of them. Usually you can rescue a disaster by over-dyeing it, but I think this one has been over-dyed a few times and never looks any better.

A dye disaster

But actually it looks ok here. It looks as if it has found its place in the world. Maybe ugliness is as much in the eye of the beholder as beauty. Maybe there is even no such thing as ugly. Beauty is, after all, one of many problematic cultural concepts that just excludes the non-conforming. It’s not exactly a match made in heaven, but then most of us can rub along ok with most people most of the time. Perfection is virtually unattainable. I will settle for OK on this occasion.

The back almost made itself. I already had the patchwork circle, pieced a while ago when I was gathering together some scraps of red print. These are mostly shiny/glitzy silk and satin, fabrics I wouldn’t ordinarily use much. But put them together, cheek by jowl, and they seem very happy.

Patchwork circle, paper-pieced, about 9” diameter

I often think auditioning fabrics to see which of them looks good together is a bit like sending them on a blind date. Sometimes they instantly find true love, and sometimes they never want to see each other again and end up back in the drawer. Eventually there will be something for all of them, even if that turns out to be solitude. Some fabrics don’t need others; they do just fine on their own. Some need company. Sometimes which of them ends up together is more luck than judgement.

Red and gold glitz

Little stitches

Making some progress on the Klee sketchbook front cover, based on his painting ‘Small Picture of Fir Trees’. I upgraded the blog and apparently I can upload videos now – this is just a little test to see what I can do.

A little seed stitching

I have a very small piece of hand-dyed silk net, which is one of the most delightful (and expensive) fabrics you can handle, and I’ve been saving it for a special occasion. I decided this was the occasion. I’m using an eco-dyed stranded floss from Arlee on layered organdie, silk organza and net.

I don’t often use a frame but seed stitching is easier this way. I also want to scatter stitches across the surface so it’s good to be able to see the whole thing.

Hand dyed silk net and silk organza

The sun is a raw-edge circle of loose-weave cotton scrim, covered with very sheer chiffon – a type of shadow applique, I guess, since the cotton circle is secured underneath the sheer.

In progress

Video, though. Imagine the possibilities!

Stitch journal cover

I finished the cover/bag for the stitch journal – something to carry it round in, and something to keep the sun off it now we’re heading for longer days.

stitch journal cover, about 15″ long

It’s basically a quilted/lined tube with a circular base and a casing around the top for some hand-dyed ribbon to tie it closed. Initially I was a bit disappointed because it turned out bigger and bulkier than I intended, and the stitch journal rolls up quite small. And then I saw this:

very large industrial wooden bobbin

I bought the large wooden bobbin some time ago with no real purpose in mind. But – what do you know – it fits the stitch journal cover *perfectly*. And furthermore, the stitch journal itself fits the bobbin *perfectly* if I hem the edges:

stitch journal with bobbin, on a roll

So the over-sized cover is actually exactly the right size, I have a purpose for a spare bobbin, and a permanent home for the stitch journal when it’s finished. I don’t know about you but I call that a roaring success. An accident for the most part, for which I can’t take much credit, but a success nevertheless.

a little gentle seeding and running stitch on beautiful eco-printed silk by Jane Hunter Textiles

So I’m taking this as a little life lesson: most things really do turn out OK in the end.

Sampler book cover

In the interests of keeping busy, I made a start on the cover for my sampler book.

birdie in his natural habitat

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to tackle the cover. I considered various kinds of needlepoint, cross stitch (really didn’t want to do any more of that) and a variety of seams. In the end I went for my usual style of book cover, which is layers of strips laid on a foundation fabric. I used modern, vintage and antique silk and cotton fabrics, mostly hand-dyed.

cover in progress

I really like old lace and ribbon, but I don’t tend to use it much. I thought this was probably a good place for it.

layered fabrics, lace and ribbon with hand stitch

A couple of weeks ago I acquired a few old wooden bobbin reels – more on that later, there are plans afoot – all of which came with very old dusty thread still in place. Most of the thread was unusable, very brittle from age and light damage. But on two of the bobbins, once the outer layer of damaged thread was removed, the rest of it appears to be sound. I’ve dyed some, and have road-tested the finer of the threads on this cover. It breaks quite easily so wouldn’t be any good for sewing seams, but it seems fine for surface decoration.

vintage cotton thread from an old mill bobbin, hand-dyed

As with the sampler book itself, I found myself wondering whether Ellen Mahon would like the cover I’ve made. I wanted to make it pretty for her.

Hand-dyed vintage viscose ribbon, very soft and silky

I wondered about whether I should label the cover with words, whether I should stitch the words ‘sampler book’ somewhere on it. I decided not, in the end. For one thing I’m not very good at stitching lettering, and for another thing I didn’t think it needed words. I really like the way stitching conveys its own meaning without the need for words as well. I always think hand-stitching is more like writing than drawing. I often find myself recognising artists’ work by their stitching the same way I might recognise the handwriting on an envelope.

Sampler book with cover
Back cover

I hope Ellen would approve.

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