happy mother’s day!

Happy Mother’s Day to my mom! We spent Saturday together because Naoto & I both work today. On Friday night, I had a mini craft-a-thon and made my mom’s gift and a gift for my sister’s baby.

My mom is the librarian in my hometown, so I embroidered her a bag with some librarian patterns from Sublime Stitching. I’d never embroidered a bag before…it took me awhile to get the hang of it. I only caught the handle in my stitches once… And I am notoriously bad at keeping the back of my work neat. I tried really hard to keep things tidy so the stitches will stay in tact as books and things are coming in and out of the bag. I folded it all up with a pretty notebook and some lovely bird stickers and wrapped it in this fun “tweets” paper from Snow & Graham.

I made a little tag out of a circle punch of chartreuse paper, a scallop punch of white and a little Amy Tangerine brad. I tied it all up with a sheer pink ribbon. I usually wrap with plain kraft butcher paper, but it was fun to break out the pretty stuff for mom!

Once I finished the bag, I moved right along to a bookbinding project. My sister’s baby, Riley, is only 5 months old and this is his “baby” gift…I had visions of using this perfectly sweet Japanese farm animal paper, but sadly I didn’t have enough and couldn’t find it anymore…so I went with this bright, cheery Japanese koi paper instead.

I used a photo album text block from Paper Source. They are really lovely, and have onion skin between each page to protect the photos…I hope it makes a nice place to put some of the baby pictures of the little guy. As I was working on the project, I was thinking, “Why don’t I make these more often…a little measuring, a little cutting, a little gluing…this is no big deal!” Then, I got to the last step and remembered–gluing the text block into the case (the covered book boards and bookcloth spine) is SOOOO stressful! It’s hard to get it just right, and the perfect measurement and gluing is the only way to make the book WORK properly…but it did and I was cheering. I should build books more often than every two years–I’m sure it would get easier.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there–especially my own!