I’ve almost finished my little book of love. This is a concertina style book so it opens out into a long strip. The original strip of calico and the basic instructions and inspiration came from a kit I’ve had in my stash for years.

The strip of calico is the width of the fabric so it’s about 150cm, it’s then folded in half so the book has two sides to decorate, I did this book in sort of layers of stitch…

The first layer I showed you a couple of weeks ago, layering pieces of fabric on and doing lots of running stitch both to hold them in place and for embellishment. It does give a lovely feel to the piece as well.

This side is more pastel coloured, the other side has more red on it. The next phase was to arrange various small pieces of embroidery and cross-stitch. Some of these I’d made into Valentine cards, some were cross-stitch smalls and some, like the embroidered heart, I wasn’t completely happy with it when I made it so it sat in a box. At the same time I cut out some large and small hearts from different fabrics such as taffeta, silk and lace from my wedding dress.

Once they were stitched on I wanted to add some words. My original plan was to type some poems or quotes onto cotton paper but the vintage type-writer I’ve borrowed from my daughter needed a new ink reel and of course I couldn’t wait for it to arrive! Instead I decided to stitch the words from the poem ‘Love is patient, love is kind’, there’s about four lines in the middle that I missed out as I didn’t have enough pages (and they were quite long lines!) I wrote the words on the fabric with a frixion pen and then embroidered them with a single strand of DMC in chain stitch. I did ponder for a while what colour to use, having decided on green I realised whatever I chose wasn’t going to go with all the greens on the fabrics, so I picked on shade and went for it. With hindsight I might have been better with a nice brown, but I didn’t think of that.

Having stitched the letters I then went along and embroidered lines of different stitches were I felt they were needed, using feather stitch, cross-stitch etc. I added ric-rac and a few pieces of lace too. Once I was reasonably happy, I stitched the seam along the bottom and one end.

Before I stitched the top seam, I put a few more stitches in, fixing down fabric where I thought it was needed, sometimes with a decorative stitch, sometimes a tiny running stitch so it wasn’t to obvious. I also added the buttons at this point, stitching round the large heart button to fill the space. Three little buttons are actually upside-down, they were fairly boring cream button, but the back for some reason has tiny flecks of pink and green, which went beautifully with the fabrics.

Once I was happy, I slip-stitched the top edges together and pressed it well, especially the folds where I want it to make the pages.

All I have to do now is make a cover for it. It is designed to have the front and back cover as part of the concertina, but I prefer to have it tucked in a cover…I have a plan!