i am not good at sketchbooks – they are more note books that sketchbooks. However, I started a new sketchbook for my books project. I was writing up and sticking in ideas from blogs. As so often happens on the Internet, one  led tuo another and I ended up in Pinterest printing lovely marking making. Having cut them out and stuck them in the sketchbook, I started to play and now I can’t stop. All quilting has ceased!!

This is one of the pages – images of Dorothy Caldwell’s mark making, the template of a Granny Boasting Book (so I can make one), other mark making images and my scribbles.

Here is another page:

Now I really must go back to the quilting! Hope you are stitching.

At our CQ West Christmas lunch, we swapped Secret Santas – not my idea of fun but a group activity!! The parcel had to have a mixture five pieces of fabric , threads or beads. My package was provided by K3N, Kathryn Chambers who is our new organiser. It was supposed to be secret but one of the pieces could only have come from K3N – it was her signature bubble stitching. It now has pride of place on the cover of February’s book along with her piece of orange fabric and an interesting ribbon.

The back cover is fairly plain as it took ages to get the rest of the book together. Here it is with my badly done french stitch binding. I need to practice it on another book as I didn’t get it quite right and eventually decided undoing it once again would result in damaged pages.

The purple was also K3N’s. And the last piece was some gold fabric which is on one of the pages.

All the pages have a small randomly sized and placed piece of printed paper in oranges and browns. Now I need to start March’s book and make it better than this one – get the cover corners clean and the binding completely correct.

Happy stitching.