"Love to Stitch" Book

My "Love to Stitch" book has been a real delight to sew. I've tried to use all sorts of stitches in its making and it has become a sample book of some of the sewing that I've enjoyed in the past few months. It was my entry for the Flowerpatch Quilters challenge "Love is in the Air".

Here are all the pages starting with the cover:

Now a little bit about each page:

On the cover I've used Sashiko cotton to stitch the letters and then many colours of embroidery cottons to stitch along the lines of the fabric pattern like Kantha work.

Next the inside cover. When I had made all my pages I realised that there weren't any that actually represented "Love is in the Air". Luckily I was off to a jumble sale and bought some music (the Air) upon which to sew some hearts (Love). I did think that I would simply stitch on the music with a free motion design of hearts, but my sewing machine had other ideas and just made a mess of stitches. I took out the threads and perforated the heart shapes with the needle so that I could tear them out. I placed the dotty red fabric behind and couched red thread between the hearts.

Page 1 is a heart made from cross stitches. When Susan Denton visited Flowerpatch she showed many quilts where the hand quilting included cross stitching so I thought I'd try it. I also like the quilting around this heart which is a combination of machine and hand quilting.

Page 2 is the design that we used when practising reverse applique. I added some embroidery stitches

Page 3 is one of the designs that we used in Flowerpatch's charity quilt. again I added embroidery stitches.

Page 4 is another of the designs in the charity quilt. More embroidery. You can print off a copy of this design here.

Page 5 is a lino printed pear which I have embellished with applied fabric and ...... you guessed it - embroidery.

Page 6 is a sample of a Lynette Anderson design. This was a trial to see how difficult it might be and now my friends and I are making a quilt using this and many other of Lynette's designs.

Inside the back cover is a redwork design that I found online. I realised that I had never actually sewn any redwork and it fitted with the theme of the book perfectly.

The back cover uses the same fabric as the front. I have spiral quilted by both machine and hand.

Each page was made up individually with a thin wadding backing. Then they were sewn together in pairs (right sides together, sew around 3 sides then turn the right way out). Calico was sewn to the open, spine sides of the pages and then they were put together by binding all the open sides with the black, gold and green fabric to make the spine.

What fun!! - Anita x