A fabric art journal

 Since I rediscovered my love of textiles recently I have been trying out a lot of new to me techniques. I don't have much free wall space in my house (does any artist?) so I make the projects letter size so I can put them together into a fabric book like an art journal for textiles. That way I can put them on a book shelf and they take up much less room. Later in the year I will show how I put it together but in the meantime here are some of the pages I have already completed.

 I was lucky enough to be given a large box of embroidery thread recently so I did a couple of tapestry canvas pages to use up some of the thread. This one has a few charms attached. They came from old earrings my daughter was going to throw away.

  This second canvas I did was an experiment of different tapestry stitches. I used an embroidery book to find them. I also added a bit of metallic thread this time.

 I recently came across zipper felt art on the Internet so decided I wanted to try it. There are lots of different ways of doing it. This was my first experiment and the dress zip was glued to the felt then I hand stitched it to make it more secure. I added embroidery and a tiny bit of quilting. This will be the cover of my journal when I make it.

This was my second experiment using a jeans zip for the flower and a thinner dress zip for the leaves. It was harder to bend the jeans zip and I probably won't use one again. The dress zip was about 4mm across the teeth, the jeans zip about 6mm. Again I glued and stitched it.

 My final piece of zipper felt art was a new name tag that I can wear to the textile group meetings. I had bought instructions from the inventor of this technique but it used a lot of hot glue so I chose to do it my way instead because I don't like using hot glue and getting it all over the place.

I cut the felt out in the shape I wanted then just hand stitched the zip to it. You can see  how I just stitched between each of the teeth. It didn't take long and has held together nicely. I did add an extra piece of felt on the back so I could stitch on the brooch backing.

My final share today is these whimsical birds I made. They come from one of the lessons for the latest issue of Workshop on the Web. I was happy I got to use these giant cotton reels I bought some time ago.