I’ve been a busy bee with my book over the last three weeks, I now have the makings of a book! It’s mini happy dance time!

Three weeks ago I was still making the final pages, cutting them to size and embellishing as necessary…

Since then I’ve finished all the pages, added a few more embellishments, organised them into some semblance of order and made them into pages. I’ve stitched the pages together and all I need to do now is make a cover.

I stiffened each page with either pelmet vilene or buckram, The vilene was left over from the garden book, I think I possibly prefer that one but the shop where I bought it from has moved to a little village not accessible by bus. B&M fabrics in Leeds sold the iron-on buckram so I thought I’d give that a try. The buckram is very adhesive on both sides so I just ironed down the edges over to the back initially. The Vilene is just adhesive on one side only so I could Iron it to the page and then iron the edges over. I slip-stitched all round before pressing the buckram side carefully so as not to get any creases forming. Most pages have one side with vilene and one side with buckram so the pages feel a similar weight.

The last couple of books I’ve made have been bound with my adaptation of Coptic stitch. This time I decided to try slip-stitching the pages together, each side was slip-stitched to it’s neighbour. I did pairs first, then put the pairs together and so on. The last one was very fiddly as by that time it was pretty thick and inflexible, making slip-stitch tricky. I tried a curved needle but mine are quite thick, too thick for the dense cotton.

I like the appearance of the slip-stitch from the inside, like you can’t see it, the disadvantage is that the book bows to the middle very slightly as the corners are more bulky. Hopefully this won’t be noticeable once the cover is on.

The hive page on the left is one where I added a little more, with the length of light purple lace and three buttons.

Having organised pages into pairs and then a rough order according to colour, I realised the one page I was having difficulty pairing up was the collage bee, just because it’s so big and bright, somewhat in your face! I made a four patch in yellow bee fabrics, initially intending to do a Raggedy Ruff quilt page. I then had the idea to make a pocket page, I’d been thinking how to do this for a while as I’ve been given or collected a few pictures of bees whilst doing this project, I was going to tuck them into the back cover. I decided however to make a page from some fine fabric which a friend gave me. I wanted to use it as she had gone to the effort of sorting it out and bringing it to the Skipton monthly meeting, the bees were quite ‘cartoonish’ though which made them quite difficult to place in the book. They worked perfectly though opposite the big bee. I just made a diagonal pocket and stitched it over the four patch. The top bee is a spare one which I carefully cut out and I confess I glued it on as whatever colour I tried showed up too much.

Another addition I made was to the goldwork bee, I cut it into a hexagon and mounted it on honeycomb fabric. I then found a gold thread which was thick enough to couch round the hexagon, I’ve had it in my stash for years so it was nice to use it. It looked great opposite the blackwork bee but I didn’t want the goldwork to damage the blackwork or the vintage lace. I used a tulle with gold bees on to make a protective page in between the two.

I’ve already chosen my fabric for the cover, a lovely blue Lewis and Irene fabric with bees on, I’ve just got to work out how I’m going to attach it. I also need some inspiration for the title of my book, otherwise it might just be called ‘Bee’, ideas so far include A Bee Compendium…which is nicely ABC, a Bee in my Bonnet, or something to do with the fact that if you count the ones on fabric too there are over 100 bees in the book!

Hopefully next SAL I’ll have my dancing shoes on 🙂

This SAL is organised by Avis, please follow the links to see what everyone else has been stitching;

Avis, Claire, Gun, Christina, Kathy, Margaret,

Sunny, Megan, Deborah, Sharon, Daisy, Cathie,

Linda, MaryMargaret, Cindy, Helen