Commercial birthday cards for anglers always feature pictures of men but I have a female friend who loves fishing and is an avid reader!  So this quarter’s challenge is the ideal time for me to make a feminine fishing card with a small gift of a textile bookmark.

If I’m making something small I always rummage in my scraps box because it will save time and money.

I found this nuno felt scrap (below left) from the making of a picture of a seahorse in 2015 (below right).

Sorry about the dodgy photo of the scrap but without stitching or anything else solid the camera couldn’t focus properly on the net.

I have some yellow heavyweight cotton fabric to back the nuno felt so I cut a piece a little bigger than the nuno felt then pinned the two together.  The cotton backing made stitching on the felt easier and made the back pretty.

I did ‘quilty’ stitching all over the nuno felt – it added interest and made it hardwearing.

I drew a template for the bookmark on an old piece of card.  I placed the template on the nuno felt then marked around it with an air-erasable pen to give me a sewing line.

After machine stitching the outline of the bookmark on the nuno felt, I cut it out very close to the stitching line.  The eye is just a dot from a black laundry marker.

To decorate a white card blank I used ‘Word’ to make a sheet of images to cut out.  The blue and yellow book is made from ‘shapes’ and colour filled then typed words on top (I can’t take credit for the humorous author’s name – it’s been around as long as I have), the shelf of books and fishing rod are free printables and the greeting is just typed above the rod.  I used thin card for printing the shapes.

‘Moby Dick’ has been scanned by Google so I printed off the first two pages to make an insert for the card.  The bookmark sits inside the card as a surprise when the card is opened.

I added some pencil lines to look like book pages and here’s the finished card front.