Pushing On

I've got my cover finished today, If I left it to the end of the project I would not take so much trouble. It has me thinking of Chinese restaurants so I must be on the right track. I intend to make a big tassel and closing mechanism for this book. I've really camped up the cover  despite the fact that I want the pages to be quite minimal and contemporary. The wrap is made of calico which I dyed, I then traced a Chinese maze pattern onto paper, pinned it to my fabric and laid it over a thin batting. It took ages to machine with a metallic thread, The next stage was to scrub the paper off. I had machined so tightly that it wouldn't come away under the stitches. I left it to dry whilst planning to start again.

By way of an experiment I delicately inked over the stitching and the paper that was still clinging to the fabric.

when it was dry I gave it  generous coat of acrylic wax. I used treasure gold on all the raised areas and another coat of wax. Success!

I used double sided carpet tape ( nothing stickier) to fix the wrap to the cover board and found a toning cover for the inside. The little cut outs on the spine I have used a tiny drill to make holes to sew the pages into later.The stitching to join the lining to the cover was heavy going (all that wax to push through), I used a curved needle and a pair of pliers. The frontispiece I made last week was then stitched on.

 As I had an hour so left this afternoon it was time to get the media out.

These are not what  I have in mind for the book but are a good warm up to set the tone (and I enjoyed making them), I need to get all the cliche's out of my mind before I start to make some special papers,