Lenna's Little Book

This has been a bit of a day, where I rushed to Loch Lomond this morning to deliver 3 quilts for the upcoming (18th - 21st May) Loch Lomond Quilt Show and I'm out again this evening to a meeting of the Tweeddale Quilters where apparently there will be fabric for sale. Very dangerous! But before it's really late I wanted to show you the Little Book I made for Lenna herself as the hostess of the Little Book swap she's hosting on her Creative Swaps site. The booklets for the swap have been shown here earlier but I wanted to wait with this one till she had received it so that it would be a surprise.

The folding is the same as for the other books but I started with a paper page which was covered with printing. This was a try-out for a new toy I obtained recently i.e. a Xyron Design Runner. And what fun it proved to be plus it also works on fabric. Wonderful. Anyway it came with cartridges featuring all kinds of lovely text and I played to my heart's content. Then I covered the page with fluid acrylic paints using spray bottles. And as promised in the brochure the text didn't run.

At the top you can see the theme of the book for Lenna which was of course friendship and I also added a taste of romance as we are both inveterate romantics. The front and back pages (seen at the top) are also adorned with my picture (when I was very much younger!) I practised with the Design Runner on fabric and then tore that into strips and added it to the pages together with stamped images as well as pictures from collage sheets.

I was particularly happy to discover the XOX on one of the cartridges and have been adorning not just this book but lots of other items with it. I have big, big plans for my new toy in future projects and have now gone one step further and acquired an accessory where you can make your own text rather than depending on what is on the commercially available cartridges. Oh boy, when I'm bad, I really go on to be even worse.

To pull the little book together I added a uniting element to each and every page. One of my most favourite textured stamps consisting of tiny little dots. I bought it in the children's craft section of Hobbycraft and it has proved invaluable, despite only costing a couple of pounds! I used blue and red Staz-on inkpads.

I'm happy to say that Lenna loved it as you can read in her blogpost here.