Most of my “extra” time was devoted to preparations for a baby shower. One of the projects that I worked on was two soft books for Baby#3. At the beginning of June, I was at Grandma’s Attic Quilting Emporium, picking up my Block of the Month block. While I was there I grabbed a panel to make an ABC soft baby book. At checkout I spied another soft book… Kewpie!
This was fortuitous because, several weeks ago, Son had left a Kewpie doll at my house. He had brought it over to show me, after receiving it from his grandmother’s estate. After dinner they went home, as usual, but left this little visitor standing vigil on the dining table:
Kewpie stayed in that exact spot until two weeks later, when they came over for dinner again. Fast forward to the beginning of June at Grandma’s Attic when I spied the Kewpie fabric. I just HAD to have it!
Starting with the panels, each set of pages were cut out on the dotted black guidelines. I also cut out the printed instructions, setting them on the stack of cut out pages.
The construction of both books was the same. Once all the pages had been cut out, they were matched according to the instructions. One piece of cotton batting was cut for each pair (front two & back two) pages. In some cases, batting strips left over from previous projects were pieced together. When all needed batting pieces had been cut, they were hand basted to their set of pages. This was done to all of the page sets for both books before heading to the sewing room where they were sewn assembly line style. This was to keep from having to pull out long threads at the end of each piece and the beginning of the next piece.
After taking a lap around each set of pages, leaving an opening to turn them right-side out, each seam was graded to reduce bulk.
Then they were turned and ironed, rolling the seams to get a sharp edge.
After closing the openings with hand stitching, a line of top stitching was added to keep the edges sharp with use. With each set of pages ready to be assembled into books, they headed back to the ironing board. Each set was folded in half, had a center crease ironed in, before stacking the pages in order.
The treadle machine doesn’t have a back stitch. A line of stitching was done down the center to attach the pages together. Then the books were turned around and another line of stitches over the top of the first. This to keep the stitches from pulling out of the top and bottom of the stitch lines.
I am very pleased with how they turned out!
Which is a good thing, because I found another panel that I had apparently purchased long ago enough, that I had completely forgotten all about it! 🙂
