Monday-10am: N

New!

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I got this cute (kinda silly) french video in a promotional email showing the new postal notebooks by Moleskine.

Those of you who have known me a while know I have been making my "bookcards" for several years. They have several pages and fit inside an envelope. I sew the pages into the paper cover with embroidery thread...

...and usually assembly line batches of them because I write a lot of letters.

Well, ever since I got this beautiful surprise gift from Desi a while back...

...a combination of pages sewn right into an envelope cover (whoohoo!)...I have wanted to make something myself, of course. But I kind of wanted to close in the sides...and no beads because I was too afraid to mail this "as is" and ended up putting it inside of a bubble envelope to mail it.

So, I was playing around this weekend trying to make something New.

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My first attempt.

I sewed in the pages with embroidery thread and kind of used the Moleskine as an example for shape. Took a lot of tweaking and trimming to get it to lie flat. Well, the Moleskine only has two sheets inside or 8 pages, counting both sides. Chatty-Cathy-me has to have more pages than that. ;)

I wonder how well the envelope will go through the mail with the embroidery thread on the edge like that? Should be fine. Anyways, I ended up trimming down the envelope/cover so much on the first one...tried to think of a simple basic template I could mass produce, of course. Came up with this plainer shape. I could always tweak these, if I wanted to, as I actually use them...you know, with scissors or punches or whatever.

What a great way to use up the 12 X 12 inch sheets I have in various paper packs that wouldn't be very good to cut down for cards because of their big pictures.

Anyways, I got that far on three more. Didn't sew pages in and not sure I will. They can just be an envelope to hold the letter sheets folded inside. Or I could sew in the sheets by hand or even by sewing machine, for that matter. :)

Anyways, it was fun making something New.

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Saturday was a perfect day to sit on the porch!

Karma, creature of habit, was in her spot by the open door for a while...

...waiting to see if I was really going to stay outside and not just be forced back inside in a few minutes due to cold or wind as I have been so far this spring. But it got up to 72, the wind had died down, and it was absolutely gorgeous out! I read all afternoon...and Karma joined me on the ottoman.

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She watched the shadows...

...of the swallows...

....darting by.

And commandeered the chair as soon as I left to get more coffee.

Sunday it was chilly and rained all day long. So dark I had to turn on a light at noon when I was sitting right by the window at the craft table! Today the sun is peeking between the white fluffy clouds, but it's only 30 degrees so far. They said we could have had snow last night but, if we did, it melted before my feet hit the floor this morning. ;)

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Have a great Monday! :):)

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"A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new."

Albert Einstein