What to do on a sunny Bank Holiday?

Make books, of course.

This one was completely unplanned. I'd seen a photo of a book with a photo of the sea on the cover, and when I came across this sea and sunset paper while looking for something else, I decided to use it as the cover of a little pamphlet stitched notebook. [It was going to be sand and sky but I put the cover on upside down.]

The paper was rather thin, so I went looking for something to back it with – and came across several pieces of sea-ish paper – I think I painted them when I was making a sea-themed hanging for C&G, but never used them.

Now it was going to be a pamphlet with sea coloured pages – but I realised that it would be better as a drum leaf binding – full spreads and no stitch.

Of course drum leaf takes a tad longer than quick and dirty pamphlet binding – but the result is much better.

This was an impulse too. During another insomniac night [shouldn’t complain. it’s ages since I had one] I decided I needed to start using some of my images in my books, instead of scrap paper. So this morning when I came across this on Donna's great ‘Make a Book a Day’ blog, I was inspired to make my own version.

Can you spot the deliberate mistake?

I could pretend that I intended to rearrange the picture, in order to symbolise the disruption of nature by human intervention – but I’d be lying. And I think it would have been better if I’d grunged up the card a bit. And the perfect beads had holes too small to get the perfect threads through. But apart from that …

And finally – people who are working on brightly coloured embroidery on brightly coloured prints shouldn’t throw stones make critical comments about ‘any colour as long as it’s bright’, should they?

There is some embroidery on there – honest. I'm not quite sure why it’s there, or whether it actually adds anything – but it is definitely bright.

The next couple of print samples up for a bit of stitch definitely aren’t.