How to tart up an old book.

Hello. I don't know where the time goes, I'm rushing again. It's been a lovely day, I've been out in the garden tidying up. My veg growing is looking abysmal this year. Things are not growing very well at all, except the potatoes, they are positively thriving. My compost is about on it's last legs, I don't bother to feed it, so at last it's about dead. A few beans are making a brave attempt to grow, but they are struggling. Every night armies of fat black slugs slither about eating everything in their path. In past years I have spent hours picking them up, out for an hour every night with a torch. I am now ready to admit defeat, they have won the battle. For this year anyway. 

Today I covered another 'Ilona', book. It's a hard back, in quite good condition. I used some plain dark blue fabric as the cover, with red and light green for the embellishment. The colours are wrong on this photo. I frayed the edges of the red and green, and used green cotton to hand stitch the design on the front panel. 

Inside the front cover, this is the exact shade of blue.

I hand stitched along the top and bottom in tiny stitches with matching thread.

I cut the piece of blue fabric bigger than the book and made a cut each side of the spine and folded the excess inside. It looks really nice.

If you want to know how to stitch perfect stars, use a template that has squares. This is a piece of plastic I cut from a mushroom tray. They end up in the bin outside our takeaway and I get them out. These trays  come in useful for all kinds of jobs, mainly storage, I've got loads of them.

Thank you for popping in. Catch you tomorrow. Toodle pip