Magggie's Patches & a winner

First, welcome to my new followers. I'd love to visit but I can't see a link, if you comment I'll be able to ;)

Second, I was one of the winners of Maggie's book giveaway! I chose Dale Rollerson's 'Let's play with Sari Ribbon' which is a sweet little booklet giving you ideas of how to use sari ribbon. In with the book, Maggie had very kindly sent some of her own precious flat woollen tapes for me to use on my 'applied yarns' samples, which she was enjoying on my blog. I was delighted, thank you Maggie!

So this week I was struggling with making this....or that, my usual weekly problem ( my list is so long, I know I'm not alone there!) I had already decided the next sample from Maggie's book 'stitches, straps & layers' would be Patches.

such exciting little things! Maggie uses them as borders & edges around her pieces, horizontally or vertically. The basic way to make them is with pelmet Vilene, bondaweb & crumpled tissue painted with walnut ink. You could use card, felt, painted papers or book pages & tea bags for dyeing instead of ink. Anything, really.

I made an A4 ish page & cut into the above strips. This gave me straight edges of course except for the one on the far right, above as I had a small piece of vilene already cut. I like both, but the cut edge means you have to paint or tea bag dye each edge...which is fine, worth it to get rid of the white. You can stitch or burn the edges (I've wanted to get my lighter out for ages!) Then you can use embossed foil, little pieces of painted papers, fabric, beads.

From left to right (top pic) I used a rusted razor blade, sweet foil with stitched raffia, painted paper from my drawer, newspaper on a tiny patch with other found paper edged in metallic paint, & finally, a copper roof tile nail - they don't make them like they used to! with verdigris colored gimp french knots , the extended kind. Couldn't believe it when I thought to myself, bet I haven't got any verdigris colored thread anywhere,  to match that wonderful nail - got these when  Jetta, who I gardened for, had her roof reslated. I was picking up these little beauties for weeks ;) -  & there it was in my ribbon & thread drawer! Kind of a 'gimp' sort of thing I think.

Well, I loved making these & decided to make a little book, inspired by Maggies 'The Little Book of Walnut Ink' which she was using to demonstrate how to use the patches on the cover. Beautiful, I really want to look inside! I found one entry on google, just one delicious page!

This is only about postcard size, with 3 signatures made with brown paper used on the worktop, handmade paper & book pages. (there's lots of work out there using book pages - finally we can use the pages we tore out of reclaimed, altered in some way, books) I bound it using phamphlet stitch, the only one I can do with ease.

Inside front cover - you can't quite see copper & gold highlights. I made the patches on the front cover quite symmetrical, for me & used book pages as well as the painted paper from my stash.

The writing on the back is from the dressmaking tissue paper I used. I'll put this in my Etsy shop next week - I only manage to add heart cards for Valentine's day last week. Well, we need a heart all year, really ;) Oh & did I mention I got my first sale? Thank you....so exciting!!!!

I showed the DH my book & patches, expecting him to say 'what're you going to use them for?' or 'they're a bit hairy' but no, he said it looked like an ancient book, reminded him of the Book of Kells. Well, you can't get better than that!