Finished the Book Cover!

I thought I had published this 10 days ago before I went to Nashville, but it was sitting in my draft file, so here goes:

This turned out to be easier in some ways and more difficult in others.  Some of you have heard me say that I am a quilter, not a sewer, and you laugh at me because how can you quilt without sewing?  But what I mean by that is that I don't understand the vocabulary that people who do other types of sewing use and I don't know the steps involved in making things other than quilts.

So I was really glad that I had Jake's book in front of me for the book cover part of this deal!

The first thing I did was applique the butterfly to my pieced background with a blanket stitch, enclosing the trim in that stitching. 

Then I changed to the free motion foot and did the quilting, using the same metallic thread in the top of the machine.

This beautiful turquoise metallic thread is by Mettler. 

What surprised me about the whole applique and quilting portion of this project is that I never took my top tension off its normal 4.0 (the 4.0 setting on the right hand side of this picture is my tension on this Laura Ashley machine; it's highlighted because this is the default setting) and I didn't have any shredding, breakage, stripping, etc.  This made me really happy that I wasn't wrestling with the thread!  I had a Schmetz Jeans/Denim needle in the machine, size 80/12.

So that finished the embellishment part of the project -- now to go to Jake's book and learn how to make a cover for the spiral bound journal that I had.

This didn't really take all that long -- I had to read the directions several times, not because they weren't clear, but because this wasn't a quilt!  I felt like I was back in sewing kindergarten here...

Jake does tell you that most of your actual sewing time is spent doing the satin stitch around the edge; I stitched it twice and really could have done it a third time for even better coverage.  Maybe when I get home from Nashville?

I'll be home Thursday night, but look for posts that I'll be writing during the convention to tell you all about the new and exciting things coming up!!!