Start your own Fabric Library!

A joyful class that combines mindful hand stitching techniques and preserving precious scraps and samples to create your very own keepsake fabric book. Learn simple embroidery stitches to embellish your needle-turn applique and create new ‘pages’ for your book.  

 Treasure those special fabrics

Jo will be sharing her organic applique with embroidery techniques and sharing different ways to use recycled fabric to make a beautiful fabric scrap book. Have you been hoarding precious scraps, baby clothes, vintage embroidery or even fancy clothes labels? Maybe you have some stitched samples from classes or experiments that are looking for a home? Let’s put them all together and create a keepsake fabric book! We will combine these with new stitched samples using Jo’s relaxed hand sewing techniques that use simple applique shapes combined with embroidery details. Jo will also provide a couple of exclusive patterns for you to use if you prefer a more structured approach.

You will be encouraged to use recycled clothes, bed linen, curtain remnants, etc to create your book but it’s also absolutely fine to use whatever fabric you like.

Week 1

We’ll look at how to choose and use recycled fabric, thread and notion options and ideas for the ‘pages’. Jo will be sharing ideas from the many fabric books she has made this year including '100 days of Organic Applique'. We’ll start things off with a first simple organic applique page.

Week 2

We will be adding embroidery to our organic applique and learning basic stitches such as whipped back stitch, chain stitch, satin stitch, buttonhole wheels and colonial knots. Jo will give you ideas for more organic stitched pages.

Week 3

We will be exploring more ideas for stitched samples and ways to use our existing materials such as adding text to vintage embroideries or how to add stitched details to precious fabrics and how to create a decorative cover. Expect to finish all your pages this week.

Week 4

In the final week we will learn how to organise our pages before stitching it all together by machine. Jo will finish by sharing more ideas for future books. Once you’ve made one you will want to make more!