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You may remember that the other day I went to the library and binged on checking out books.
I hope to gain a lot of inspiration from them in the coming days, and one I have already looked at inspired this project.
Bound: Over 20 Artful Handmade Books by Erica Ekrem is a lovely book full of amazing ideas for making your own books. From traditional leather-bound volumes to books made with old books, books made with shells and leaves as covers to books covered by cigar boxes, there’s something sure to inspire everyone here.
But I don’t have the supplies to make books. And I’m not about to go buy them.
So I needed to take inspiration from this book in a different way.
And there it was, on page 66.
A project known as Warmly Yours, which uses a felted sweater with embroidered lines on it as the cover of a notebook.
It’s lovely even if you’re not as into fiber as I am.
I decided I needed to embroider on some felt, so that’s what I did.
How to Embroider on Felt
The project in the book uses a felted sweater and a sewing machine’s zigzag stitch set very narrow so that it almost looks like the lines are continuous.
You could of course do this same thing with purchased felt if you don’t happen to have any felted sweaters or sweaters you want to felt lying around.
I have a lot of handmade felt because I felted many, many swatches for my book about felting. These lovely squares and rectangles have been sitting in a closet for much too long, so I pulled out a bright red one, grabbed some yarn and started stitch.
Though this looks like I used several different yarns, it’s actually only two. The light purple is one that was randomly sitting out in my office (sometimes not cleaning up has its advantages) while the pink, black and deeper purple all came from the same ball I used on the stick weaving project earlier this week. I just cut the yarn at the color changes and stitched with each individually.
I really like the organic nature of this project. You can’t tell a sewing needle where to go when you’re sewing through thick felt like this, so the lines naturally aren’t very straight or consistently close together.
I stitched the lines horizontally but I like the look of it with vertical lines, too.
I don’t know that it’s finished; something like this would be a fun way to use up tiny scraps, just stitching a few stitches in each color and adding on whenever you have a spare end floating around.
I also don’t know what this project is, or if it needs to be anything. It could be a pocket on some future project, or when I declare it done it would be a really cool wall hanging.
What do you think? If you try out this project I’d love to see how it went! Just tag me online with #ourdailycraft.