Felted and embroidered journal covers...

Two big projects I was working on in the run up to Christmas were a couple of felted and embroidered journal covers, made to cover Moleskine large note/sketchbooks.  The colour themes were 'Sea' and 'Autumn'.  These were by far the biggest felting projects I have undertaken using my embellisher machine, and it certainly felt the strain of felting mixed fibres over about a 30cm x 20cm area - lots of broken needles!

For 'Sea', I used organza ribbon and fabric, wool locks, merino roving, silk fibre, silk noil, silk throwsters waste, angelina fibre, silk/metal organza fabric, net fabric, silk fabric and bamboo fibre.  I felted this onto cotton batting, and then masked off the journal cover area and added lots of hand embroidery stitches: feather, colonial knot, bullion, seed, whipped spider, cast-on, double cast-on and fly stitches.

I also added a beautiful big carved mother-of-pearl button (it had been lying in wait in my stash for years, waiting for the perfect project!).

To make the lining of the cover, I used pieces of antique Japanese kimono fabric samples - I bought many of these at the most amazing temple book market in Kyoto on our last trip in 2007:

I also made two different kumihimo braids, one for a page-marker and one for closure.  Here's what the inside looks like, with the cover on the journal:

And here's the final journal cover, inside and outside:

...and a closeup of the button, and a texture closeup:

Phew!  That's a lot of photos... !  I think I'll show 'Autumn' in a separate post :D