Look...a book!..well almost.....

Today has been the most wonderful day since I tried to rearrange my face with an immovable object.  It's snowing, I'm home, I've been almost pain free all day,  I've some foot-stompin, honky-tonk country music on Pandora, and I've been working on my Morris book for about 5 hours... mostly at the sewing machine...

If you look closely as you pass my chair while I'm on my sewing machine, you will see a little fat, black butt sticking out from under the chair... He dozes with his nose right next to my foot.  My dog loves me!!!!!

Of course the first problem I ran into is that the 16 blocks weren't all exactly the same size...  In fact there was a considerable difference from the largest to the smallest..  The obvious and easiest solution was to cut all of them down to the size of the smallest block... BUT I liked the larger size so I trimmed out all the  blocks (on the left) and then cut them all to the same size.

Heaven knows I didn't want limp pages so each page is lined with a piece of light weight felt...  The front and back covers have the felt plus a piece of very heavy fusible interfacing. You all know how great hindsight is ..right?  Well I get to this stage and realize that I want the cover pages larger...  I could have planned for this in the beginning but didn't.... but I'll remember when I make my next book...

You can see I trimmed the covers out with the tiny polka dots and I'm preparing to sew  on the bias binding.  It will take me several days to get all the bias binding sewn by hand...

I hadn't shown you the inside of the back page...  It is a "pocket" page..  It will hold the laminated narratives for all the pages...

The blocks are back to back in groups of two pages.. twelve pages besides the covers. Since my book will be so thick I will need a spine and I marked it so I can evenly space the pages...  But I didn't want the interfacing showing on the inside of the book and it's impossible to mark the black  polka dots...  I stitched along the marked lines with white thread in the bobbin so I can see where to stitch the pages..

My garden is always full of critters and it supplies food for them throughout the winter... I walk to the window often to watch them... After a fresh snow like today I see little tracks everywhere.
And by the way this post is a milestone of sorts...it is #1200.