Time is flying by, isn’t it? I can’t believe it is April already. I don’t feel like I’m accomplishing much lately. But I’ll show you a little stitching I have been working on.

I started working on this 5″ x 7″ felted landscape a couple of weeks ago. I needle felted first and then machine needle felted.

Then I free motion stitched the background mountains. The foreground will be hand stitched so I thought the smaller machine stitching in the background would be less prominent.

Here’s a little closer view. I used really dark grey, medium grey and white threads.

And then I picked out my threads for hand stitching. That’s as far as I have gotten. I haven’t been motivated to pick it up and start the hand stitching since then. The plan is to use distorted cross stitch on the tree area.

I decided that I should start using some of the fabric that I have “decorated” with my local group. So I took out my soy wax batik fabrics and decided to make book covers. I thought they might be good to sell in the store so I found some inexpensive sketch books to cover. I stitched several fabrics together and backed it with batting and quilted it.

On the grid pattern, I just used a straight stitch.

I did free motion stitching around the leaves and the “pebbles”.

Then I followed Lyric Kinard’s tutorial for making a book cover. She does give a general idea of how to measure but that somehow didn’t work for me. The first one above, was too small and the book wouldn’t fit in.

Here’s the back. Now I need to find a book that fits it. It is about 5″ x 8″.

Then I decided I would make the next one bigger. And of course it was too big for the books I had purchased. It did however fit the sketchbook that I carry all the time. So I guess I’ll just have to keep this one.

Here’s the back. The only problem is that I sewed the inside fabric upside down.

The fabric is right side up here but the book is upside down. Of course I could use the back as the front but I like the leaves better than the grid. So I just won’t worry about all that upside down writing. I think it’s in French so I can’t read it anyway!

So on to making some more that fit. You can see the pile of notebooks in the upper right corner of the photo. I am using a piece of break down screen printed fabric this time. I have laid it out on a piece of batting.

I safety pinned it to the batting to get ready to do some free motion quilting.

And off I go.

I am using a blue-green cotton thread and I really like how the outline looks. I considered using a red thread but thought it might be a bit much on the contrast.

I still have a way to go on the quilting for this one. Hopefully, I’ll do a better job on getting the size correct this time. Three times a charm, right?