It's finished.

There are one or two minor adjustments to be made, such as moving the hook of the clasp a little further onto the fastening flap so that it wraps around the book properly.

A detail showing the bottom right corner of the front cover. The back cover just has the outer stitched border and inner braid border but no other decoration. I've had those funny brass buttons for ages and knew they'd be useful one day. They are stitched through the little squares of gold metal shim.

I found this metal tassel on a cheap necklace and took it off to stitch to the fastening flap. I took the book to the gallery yesterday when I was stewarding and began stitching the pages together, back to back, to hide all the untidy reverse sides. I'm there again from 10 until 5 on Friday but my hands are tired as the stitching is quite arduous so I may take some knitting instead. I have been playing with the embellishing machine and experimenting with embellished knitting. I have in mind to use the results as the background for small stitched landscapes and have found that the wrong side of the surface after embellishing gives a beautiful impressionist painting effect. I'll take some photos and post them next time.

Talking of time, it has flown. It seemed an age before the exhibition actually started, and it's been on all month which stretched far ahead at the beginning, but now we are almost at the end and on Monday it will all come down. A short breather and then we must turn our thoughts to North Somerset Arts Week next spring. Time to make another book maybe?

I'll leave you with a nice restful picture of two old codgers taking their ease! It's amazing that that position is comfortable for our poor old cat who takes ages to sit down sometimes - his joints are so stiff. Obviously his back is the most comfortable and pliable part of his body and he'll lie like this for as long as my husband will put up with it.