Yippee, I Beat the Clock

Well, I'm amazed.  I actually finished a challenge on time for once.  And oddly, it came out better than I had expected.

Here's a photo of the finished piece.  I stuck with the black eyelash I-cord i had already made to embellish the seams of the page, but I thought it would be over-use to edge the page with the same fiber.  So I selected some polyester fiber called "Candy FX" by Berroco to make the edging.  I bought just one skein of this fiber a year or so ago to see how it would work up.  (Note to knitters:  I do not recommend this fiber.  It has to be one of the most difficult yarns I have ever worked with due to the way the manufacturer attached the slubbed pieces to the main strand.  Berroco says to work Candy FX with another fiber and I did not.  In my humble opinion, however, working two strands together would not improve the ease with which a knitter could work with this fiber.)  I made the edging from Candy FX and it was a perfect choice for this particular project.  The colors in the photo don't really do justice to the actual color scheme.  And the irregularity of the stitches caused by Candy FX's slubbing complimented the eyelash yarn.  I hand-stitched the I-cord and edging to the fabric page.

I left the back of the page essentially unembellished except for a rogue piece of edging that I was going to unravel so that I could use the yarn again.  No big surprise that ripping a completed piece would be a no-go.  So I sewed the edging piece to the back of the page, and left the unraveled end hanging off the bottom.  What looks like unraveled fiber on the side of the page is just some extra yarn that I cut up and tied to the end tails of the edging.  I thought maybe some black beads hanging from the threads would be neat, but it was too over-the-top, so I let the yarns speak for themselves and decided the work was done.

I assembled the backing for the book according to the directions in Cloth, Paper Scissors, as noted in my first post for this month's challenge.  Here's the inside cover.  I used spray adhesive to attach the cloth and the paper to the foam board.  It worked fine on the cloth, but not so well on the paper.  I will go back later and use a stronger adhesive in the places where the paper is sneaking off the backing.

And here is the outside cover of the book backing.  I just love the fabric.  The design is all orange, peach, and yellow on black.

My only disappointment is that I didn't make the page as large as it could have been.  I have decided to turn this into a design feature and stagger the length of additional pages, making each successive page a bit longer.

I am still working out how to use the Weave-It squares in my fabric book.  I have not had either the nerve or the heart to cut them yet, and I haven't worked with any more fibers since my last post.  Depending on the upcoming challenges, this Weave-It experiment will either be free-standing or I'll incorporate into one of the coming challenges.