Bird Book

I have taken a small break from work to make a book cover.  It's a present (possibly won't be a surprise now...) so I thought I'd make use of a Stencil Girls Swallows stencil, some lovely hand-dyed fabric, DeColourant my long suffering sewing machine.

First I pressed the fabric and then stencilled a bird design around the lower part of the fabric with DeColourant.  I have reviewed this product before and didn't get on very well with the DeColourant Spray but I do like the bottled stuff.

After sponging this on and then ironing, the design came out really well.  I then launched into stitching the fabric.  The gorgeous fabric was bought from the Festival of Quilts from Jo Lovelock who sells the fabric under Alter Ego www.handdyedfabrics.co.uk

 This was the design overall for the whole piece.  I decided to make a book cover that you can fit a bought notebook into due to time constraints.  On a good day, I would have cut the paper and sewn them all in.

The beautiful fabric had lots of interesting patterns on it, so it was easy just to stitch around those.

For each bird, I stitched around in grey cotton. to give the impression of feathers.

On the edge of the book, I sewed seed beads in a blanket stitch.

All done!

Swallows Stencil copyright The Red Door Studio L.L.C., Artist: Tracie Lyn Huskamp, Manufacturer: www.StencilGirlProducts.com