Assembly: Coptic Sampler Book

A very long time ago i showed a sampler book I made I made this tutorial and put it in draft form and forgot it was here.  Looked at all the drafts I had for my blog that I did long ago and realized this one was complete and never poster for the last 5 years.  Not sure how that happened but enjoy this new but old post.


Bookbinding
Supplies for link stitch book (aka coptic book)

• Finished covers: 
• wood :plained, sanded smooth, with holes drilled in them
• davey board :covered in decorative paper
• fabric : sewn
• signatures :Pressed and punched pages (pages in a group are known as signatures)
• Curved or straight needle
• Bone folder or iron (if it is paper, use a bone folder; if  it is fabric, you can use either a bone folder or iron)
• Scissors
• thread for sewing ( has to be strong can be waxed)
• Teasing needle (or awl)

Picture 1

• Shows how the first signature is sewn to the cover.
• To tighten stitches use your needle to pull at the stitches.
• Always make sure you have enough thread to sew on covers.
• Never add thread when sewing on the covers, only add on the inside of a signature.

Picture 2

• If you have been careful not to get your threads twisted, your book should look similar to picture 2.
• If you have been sewing right to left, instead of left to right, all of the instructions are mirror-opposite.

Picture 3

• Hold the loop from the kettle stitch hole to keep it from pulling through, and pull on the first stitch (out of the fabric hole) to snug up the slack inside of the signature.
• See picture 3

Picture 4

• Then pull on the left side of the loop stitch so that the first stitch pulls up snug.
• See picture 4

Picture 5 A and 5 B

• Pull the loop stitch snug by pulling the second stitch up out of the cover hole as in picture 5A or 5B

Picture 6

• Pull the rest of the stitches snug in the same manner.
• The loop from the kettle stitch should still be there.

Picture 7

• When the first gather and the cover have been sewn together, it should look like picture 7.

Picture 8

• Check between the cover and the first gather .
• The thread should look like picture 8 and the outside should look like picture 7 with the first stitch and the second stitch lying next to each other.
• If the stitches are twisted over each other, you should undue them and re-sew.

Picture 9

• Press the thread into the fabric with the board folder after you sew on each signature.
• The link stitch is used to sew the signatures together.
• The basic pattern is shown in picture 9.
• The links are sewn in the opposite direction of the sewing direction

Picture 10

• Picture 10 shows how to sew the second signature onto the first one.
• The link stitches go between the fist signature and the cover.
• The thread comes out the kettle stitch hole of the second gather and sews through the loop in the kettle stitch hole in the first signature.
• The tail end of the thread can then be pulled snug, to pull the loop snug, as shown at the left of picture 10.

Picture 11

• Check again between the cover and the first signature.
• The link stitch should be only around the bottom of the first and second stitch as shown in picture 11.
  
• It should not be sewn through the loop stitch, or any of the threads.
• When sewing onto cover, it is a good idea to part-way open the cover as you sew the links onto it to avoid sewing through any previous cover attachment stitches.
• There are fewer problems sewing the rest of the link stitches.

Picture 12

• Sew on the third signature as shown in picture 12.
• The link stitches are sewn only around the previous gather.

Picture 13A

• In picture 13 A it shows the kettle stitch, sewn from either end of the book.
• After the third signature, a kettle stitch is sewn, and after every signature for the rest of the book.
• To sew the kettle stitch, pull the thread toward the cover center (A on figure 13 A)

Picture 13B

• Point the needle between the two previous signatures for example, if you have just finished sewing on the third signature, your needle goes between the first signature and second signature (see right hand side of figure 13A) or, if you have gone on and finished the fourth signature, the needle goes between signature 2 and 3 as in picture 13 B.
• The needle always points into the book.
• The needle goes under the previous loop joining the previous signatures and over the thread that is pulled toward the base of the book.
• Pull your needle straight up.
• Do not go back under any thread.
• You should have a loop that is sewn through

Picture 14

• 
  

Picture 15

• 
  

Picture 16

• tie off and cut thread

Crochet Oya lace book in English

I have been looking for a while for an Oya lace book in English.  I have found one and it is available on Amazon for an inexpensive price compared to the ones from Turkey.  This book has the crochet version of Oya not the needle version.  It also includes 2 samples of tatted versions (on page 54 and the same photo is on the cover) in the photos but there are not any tatting patterns in the book.  If you already know how to tat you could make them from the photos.
The Beaded edge (inspired designs for crocheted edgings and trims)
Midori Nishida/CRK Design
88 page book
isbn 978-1-59668-300-6

Crochet Yo-yo giveaway...Blogiversary

I am celebrating my book and my blogs anniversary together.

I received a few copies of my book in the mail yesterday and want to share with my readers.  Please leave your comment at the end of this post to be entered into a drawing for a signed copy of this book.  The books winner will be drawn and announced on July 5th.

Make sure you leave a way for me to get a hold of you or I will have to draw a different winner.  thanks and good luck

Update: to answer a question in the comments yes I am willing to ship the prize any where in the world if the post goes there.

For those who are new to my blog this is where the pattern is for the crochet piece featured in my blog banner.

Yoyo Crochet Tutorial in book form

My popular yo-yo crochet tutorial has now been made into a book so you can take it with you when you go places and keep it with your project.  Annie's Attic has made it available for those who have asked when can they buy a hard copy the time is approaching. 

There are the old ways as well as a few new ways of manipulating the yoyos such as :Hexagon yo-yo, zig-zag yo-yo, granny square yo-yo, straight lines yo-yo and yo-yos in a chevron formation.  The techniques are discussed in the projects so you can learn to manipulate this very versatile stitch all the more and create some of your own unique projects as well as the ones in the book.

• You can be put on a waiting email list so when the book is available to pre-order you will receive and email for it.  That area is in the link above in the box that reads "notify me". 

I am so excited about this it is so weird to see my name in print on a book cover that can be purchased all over the world by a major distributor.  This is something I wanted to do for a while I hope to be able to do more things in the future.

Projects include

1. baby blanket
2. hex lap afghan( which has the hexagon pattern and how to join them in it)
3. hex pillow
4. trivet
5. place-mat set
6. matching hot plate for place-mat set
7. shawl
8. hat to match shawl (2 versions of hat one short and one longer)
9. scarf 

• Then there is the tutorial itself  which covers row construction, granny construction, joining has more info for different techniques than the one on my blog did

Bonus explanations of how to use tutorial in the joining area of the book's how to there is ideas how to make 3 more items

1. granny square yoyo scarf
2. giant yo-yo granny square baby car seat afghan
3. granny squares (like my afghan in thread) with starting chain counts

To clear up some confusion that may arise from the sites references.
Annie's site reads 8 projects and the cover reads 9 but there are 12 if you count the three explained at the end of the joining tutorial and then there is the tutorial itself.  I am not counting the second version of the hat as a separate pattern but if you did then add one more to the list.

new book has to wait

So I am still doing demolition work after work and as time permits, which isn't much. It makes me ill as all get out; I have asthma and bronchitis at the moment, and all the dust of sanding is just killing me. I have been waiting for this book to come; it came Friday. However, it will have to wait because we are a week behind on our project of demo and then painting and putting in new floors and doors and the list goes on and on......

BBC meme on books

So apparently, the BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions (if you want to play): Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read once. Enter a number for the number of times you read something. (Make sure you delete my X's!) When you've finished put your total at the bottom.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen, (only watched in movie form, haven't read, yet)
   
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien, parts of it (watched the movies a few times)
   
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling, X yep, twice (and watched tons of times in movie form)
   
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee, X yep, a few times; too many to remember (watched the movie, too)
   
6. The Bible, yep
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte, parts of it
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell, X yep, a few times
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens, X yep, a few times (watched a few versions of it in movie form)
    
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott, X a few times (and watched movie of it a few times)
    
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller, parts of it
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare, X yep, a lot of times
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien, X yep, (watched the movie too)
    
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger, part of it
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell, (nope, but watched the movie tons of times)
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald, (nope, saw the movie)
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy, (parts of it)
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams, X (a few times)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck, X (a few times; it is about the part of California where I grew up. I knew all the places they talked about in the book and watched the movie)
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll, X (a few times, and the movie tons of times)
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame, X yep, (the movie tons of times)
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens, X yep (the movie a few times)
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis, X yep, (re-reading right now) (watched both British and American versions of most of these books, too)
    
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis, X yep, a few times and watched the movies, too (this is stupid, it is part of no. 33!)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden, (nope, but saw the movie)
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne, X (yep, have an old edition of it)(and have a ton of Disney movies on it, too)
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell, X Yep, a few times
42. The Da Vinci Code
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery, X Yep, a few times (and the movies, too, over a doz times)
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding, X Yep (the movie a few of times)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert, X yep (and saw the movie)
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens, X yep
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck, X yep
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas, parts of it
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville, X yep
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens, X yep
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker, X yep (love vampire stories; read it, watched it) (the movies tons of times)
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett, X yep
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Inferno - Dante, X yes, a few times
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens, X yep (and own about 7 versions of it in movie form)
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker, no but watched it three times
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White, X yep, a few times (and watched it tons of times)
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, X yep
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery, X yep
    
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams, X yep, a few times and watched the movie a few times, too
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas, X yep, and watched many a movie based on it
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare, X yep, a few times (the movie a few times)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl, X yep (and have both versions of it in movie form )
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo, X yep, love the movies, too

You will discover that I like reading books a few times and then I like to compare them to their movie counter parts just to see someone else's point of view on a story; it is interesting to me.
My tallies are
read: 34
read parts of only: 6
read all or part of and watched in movie form: 23
only seen in movie form:5

So, I guess I have read more than I have watched. they didn't want to know the movie part; I was just curious.

Currently I am reading the Cronicals of Narnia and the Ink Heart series, all three books. I want to read them all before I watch the movie (Inkheart) because the movie looks to be parts of book 1 and 2 so far, and I am curious about that.

Making Commuter Crochet Lace Again

So both my wrists are doing much better. The last two days I went to work without two arm braces on. Cross my fingers it stays that way. So I have gotten back into my commute of crocheting while my husband drives. I have about 1 1/3 yards made of this lace.

It drove me crazy for the last few weeks to do almost nothing but work. If I did more than that I was in such pain that I couldn't even cut my own dinner (aren't husbands great -- they help out when in need) but it sure made me feel like a little kid. Also no fun to wear arm braces at my husband's only brother's wedding. Definitely did not match my oriental silk satin Cheongsam. Mine is the same fabric and style as the one to the left, but the one I wore was white, and I wore a black skirt under it.

Update:

I have been asked by a few people what is this lace for and where did it come from. It is is from 111 easy edgings, pattern number 1. The use of it, that is funny -- I have no use for it. I just like making lace. When a use arrives, then I already have lace on hand to use. The book has 111 edgings, thus the name. In time, I want to make 1 of each for no other reason than to have lace on hand and to say to myself, "I did just that -- made 111 edgings!" Some are simple, some are fancy. I don't know if I will actually make all 111, but it might be fun to try; and if I never get it done, or I change my mind, then I still had fun making the ones I did, and I still have the lace to use.

Cool in-laws

My in-laws, one of which edits this blog for me, got me some real cool Christmas gifts. If you have read this blog for a while you know I like old fashioned tin eggs and have been looking for them for awhile. My mother-in-law, the dear she is, gave me 2 dozen eggs for Christmas to add to my collection. It was real cute: she put them inside of egg creates to give them to me. At first I was "what is this?" when I saw the side of the egg boxes. Then, when I flipped it over and saw the top of the box, I could see the tin eggs inside! So cool, to say the least. My MIL started looking for these back in March when I posted about them. I think she found them on E bay. When they showed up at her house after my birthday and after Easter she decided to hold on to them 'till Christmas.

I also got some real cool craft books from them for Christmas, too. I have been wanting these for awhile; just was waiting for the right time. I guess the right time came to someone else.

Christmas swap at MJF

Group1

1. creatmyworld : Beaded Wreath ornament sun catcher.
2. smoothiejuice : I can't remember which was in which swap -- hot cocoa and Santa mitten.
   
   
3. sunshine : Boa scarves.
4. botanical bath: I can't remember if soap was in group one or group two; same goes for the lotion she made, but you either got this or lotion.
5. Gaias Rose : Hand-made ornaments.
6. Willowtreecreek : hand decorated notebook.
7. Bertha : Pin in box with ornament decoration on box.
8. Rebekka Mae : Citrus ornament and needle case.
9. Cheryl : Hand towels, there are 4 styles; each person gets one, not all four. I kept a tree.
10. Tina Michelle : Heart ornaments and bookmarks.
11. Farmgirlwannabe : Embroidered Christmas sock with Sees candies inside.
    
    
    Group2
    

1. creatmyworld : Snow flake beaded ornament sun catcher.
2. smoothiejuice: I can't remember which was in which swap: hot cocoa and Santa mitten.
   
3. sunshine : Handmade brooch.
4. botanical bath: I can't remember if lotion was in group one or group two; same goes for the soap she made, but you either got this or soap.
5. Gaias Rose : Tree-shaped ornaments.
6. Willowtreecreek : Hand-made pin.
7. yarnmamma
   
   
8. ktknits : Basket.
9. allee: She sent a crocheted tree; can't find photo of it, don't know why.
   
10. dropped
    
11. dropped

My last two weeks have been too busy and this post shows it. Yikes!