Crazy Quilt Seam Treatment Notebook

For those who know me, I have been doing artwork since I was about 4 - or at least that is what Mom keeps telling me. I come from an artistic family on both sides.  I enjoy looking at the world and dreaming of artistic endeavors. So, when I say that walking into a fabric store with all the colors and patterns and such puts me into an artistic frenzy, you'll know I genetically come by it.

Fabric store have always made my fingers twitch, my brain go wild and my pocketbook scream. I have been resisting the call to do quilting and such because I need another craft to learn like I need another hole in my head.

Still a couple of years ago I gave into Crazy Quilting (CQ). I took a class and created a few blocks (will post pictures of them another time). Loved the embroidering aspect of this form of quilting. Also enjoyed the individualistic aspect of the whole genre.

Still in looking over old crazy quilts in books and those being sold on eBay, I noticed I needed to study the seam patterns - the stitches and what combinations apealed to me. So I created notebook to draw out and paste in CQ seam treatment patterns.

Here's what it looks like:

Printed out a photo of a favorite CQ picture and covered the front of a composition book with it. This is the front cover. Also took some book tape down the spine which also attached a marker ribbon.

Used my computer to print out a front page titel to the book and added a picture of another CQ picture.

At the back of the book, created a section showing how to do some basic embroidery stitches commonly used to decorate CQ's. Some I sketched in myself (right side) some I pasted in printed diagrams (left side).

Used a handful of colored pens to draw the seams that appealed to me. Having a composition book full of gridded paper really helps to do this. The only problem was that the ink bled through the paper - so I covered the back of the pages with CQ square close-up pictures.

This is the back of the notebook.

I keep this notebook with me to draw in when there is. time  It really is helping me with my current CQ work. It's good to have a lot of ideas in one spot. It's got 104 pages. I've filled up to 82 with seam treatments. Am going to have to set of a second one soon.

Reference notebooks are very handy things.