I finally plucked up the courage and started stitching the pages together for my garden book. I’ve been prevaricating for a while on how to do it, I discussed it with one of my friends from my stitching group who has made lots of textile books and made a plan I was happy with…

Each page is backed with pelmet interfacing, it’s actually double-sided iron-on, which I didn’t realise initially, but it’s actually been quite useful. I worked out what size I wanted the pages to end up and trimmed the stitching with a half inch border. The hardest bit was lining up the embroidery onto the vilene as I had to press it from the fabric side and I couldn’t see through it easily. Here’s a pile waiting to be stitched together…

Four blocks need making a little bigger, mainly early stitchings before I’d really settled into the project. Two of them are crazy patchwork ones so I can just add a narrow border on two of the sides. The other two are embroideries I can put a border round. One I’ve already done is the trees embroidery…

I’m slip stitching the pages together – I’ll work out later how to bind them together! I’ve made four pages so far, I think I’ll end up with about ten or twelve. I’m pleased with how they’re coming together.

Having put the pages into a sensible order, I realised I was one page short, I needed another page about the patio area. I decided to do one about the birds that visit the garden as the feeding station is in that area. I remembered some mini panels I bought at the Harrogate show last year, they were of beautiful paintings of birds. Perfect! I chose the bluetit as they are regular visitors. It has a nice splogy background, I decided to write the names of birds that visit the garden or that we see from the garden. I wanted it to look like the bird painting was on top of the words, so a couple of the less common sightings are disappearing behind the blue tit. I’ve used a variegated DMC thread which is subtle enough to be seen without dominating the image.

I’ve just got the last four letters to stitch and then a label below on linen. I’ve still got a fair bit of work to do before this project is finished, so I’m not polishing my dancing shoes just yet!

This stitch-a-long is organised by Avis from Stitching by the Sea, please follow the links to see what everyone else has been stitching.

Avis, Claire, Gun, Kathy, Margaret, Jackie, Sunny, Megan, Deborah, Sharon, Daisy, Cathie, Linda, Mary Margaret, and Cindy