Embroidered book finished!

I finally finished my embroidered book! It seems like embroidery is all I've been doing this long weekend. I took photos, but they didn't come out that well. Here are some scans, which still look a bit different from the real thing.

This is the cover, opened out. I used metallic thread (couched), which is really sparkly in real life, for the front and plain perle cotton for the list on the back page (again more shiny in real life). I was going to embroider another fish on the back but then I thought it would be fun to make the list, since all the creatures I did include have such cool names.

The second and third pages are the humpback angler fish and the umbrella mouth gulper, which both have bioluminescent extremities (done in glow in the dark thread, which unfortunately looks quite unspectacular in daylight).

The middle page is the vampire squid from hell, which again is done with the bioluminescent spots in white DMC glow in the dark floss (much nicer to work with than the other GITD thread). Also, the back tentacles are done in pale pink backstitch and french knots, which you can't quite tell in the scan.

Pages 6 and 7 are the dumbo octopus and chimaera. This is the first time I've used split stitch as a filling stitch and it was surprisingly quick and easy. I felt like they needed something to unify them on the page, so I did some waves in blue variegeted floss. The colours look slightly washed out in the scan.

I put the book together, mini-zine style, after first completing the embroidery on the sheet of linen. I had to trim the edges of the middle pages a bit to get the page widths even. Then I went along each edge with a small machine zig zag stitch. The finished book is about the size of a postcard.

And that's it. I have to admit I'm not 100 percent happy with it - it seems quite insubstantial for something I spent so long to make. I didn't enjoy working with the black linen so much - I had to give it a good going-over with sticky tape to get rid of all the cat hair! I prefer a finer grained fabric, and brighter colours, but I did choose this subject partly because the colours would be more muted (my swap partner prefers a much less vivid palette than I do). But I did enjoy doing the embroidery and it was a fun experiment. I already have something in mind for my next one.......