Melted September - Making a Textiles Sketchbook for September

I first started making my textiles book before I went on a trip to Paris in 2008.

My plan was to sew all the background pages before I went and then work on top of those pages by recording interesting things I'd seen with little scraps of fabric and stitch. We were travelling by coach so I thought it would be a good way to spend my time as drove from place to place.

I only managed to make the cover, "end pages" and two page spreads before my sewing machine died on me so I never got to take my travel journal with me.

One of the places we visited whilst in France was the Palace of Versailles.

I had no idea what this palace was until I got there and I certainly had no idea of how spectacular it would be.

Versailles Palace by hrae920
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When I came back I decided that my textiles book would be devoted to Versailles, rather than Paris.

I started to have a look at some of the photos we'd taken there and formulated some ideas of the sorts of things I could sew into my fabric travel journal.

If you have a look at my Versailles lens (featured below) you can read about some of the ideas I came up with.

Gardens at Versailles by kembry
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Of course you can't have a book about Versailles without mentioning the outrageous Marie Antoinette and what a perfect person to inspire textiles pieces.

Marie Antoinette Party in Pink at Versailles by lapapeteriedeParis
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How could any textiles artist and former student of costume resist Marie Antoinette?

MARIE ANTOINETTE PASTILLE ORNAMENT by pauletteparis
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Not only can you study the fashions of the 1700s (those enormous hip buckets and gorgeous fabrics) but there are also fans, feathers and wigs to be considered. I can't remember where I heard it but apparently laws had to be brought in to put a limit on how high wigs could be after one woman burnt to death after catching her hair in a candle lit chandelier!

These are a few doodles and textiles pieces I'd already produced based on Marie Antoinette and the fashions of that time period.

I couldn't get this image out of my head - a woman struggling to keep her neck up and stop her enormous hair from pulling her over:

Marie by melteddoodles
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This textiles piece was produced as a set of 4 pieces about women from different time periods in history. I used the basic shape of the doodle above but used more realistic colours!

Marie Antoinette by meltedrachel
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My two favourite crazy wig designs:

The Ship Wig:

Ship Wig by melteddoodles
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The Birdcage Wig:

Birdcage Wig by melteddoodles
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I started work with the pages because I needed to know how thick my book was going to be.

The image below is a detail of a textiles page featuring a Marie Antoinette inspired character.

In the images below you can see how I started to bind the pages together.

I don't have a huge amount of book binding knowledge so I just went with the technique that I found worked for making a sturdy book.

Vital Statistics of the Finished Textiles Book.

The size of the book will depend upon the materials you can get hold of and the thickness depends on how many pages you want to put in your textiles book and how many layers those individual layers have.

Project Stats

Difficulty Level: As hard as you want to make it!

Time: As long as you want to work on it!

Skills:

Layering
Hand sewing
Machine sewing
Any other additional skills that you'd like to add.

Of course there is more to a textiles book than just the covers - this is the problem I had when I was solely making a calendar - how could I how off the hard work I'd put into my textiles sketchbook when I could only show one image?

That's when I decided that I needed to put all these projects into an e-book. Then I could show everything off as much as I wanted and add lots more info.