On The Third Day of Christmas

I am playing with text tablets which I have made,

now these can be any shape you like.Their purpose is to provide you with a space to write in, on whatever subject takes your fancy.If you find tags or a pleasing shape in book, trace them and make yourself a template you can use again and again. Cereal and pizza boxes are great for template making. Here I have written down the Christmas cake recipe I use every year. The tradition goes like this, we make our cake, and any other Christmas cakes we are making for others on the weekend closest to first of September or thereabouts. Whilst we bake, we listen to Christmas music and the children have to stir the cake and make a wish, the cake is all ways cooked in my Grand mama Marth's cake tin, twelve inch round. Once the cake is in the oven we have to watch a Christmas movie, eating pop corn and getting very excited! Great fun and you get a little bit of Christmas in September.

The background to the page is rubber stamped holly leaves, painted with Koh-I-Noor brilliant water based dyes, but you could use any paint. The berries are glittered with Martha Stewart glitter.

The right hand page was built to create a pocket. First I selected a piece of decorative paper, this one is My Minds Eye and cropped it to a suitable size, just a little smaller than the page it is going to sit on. Then with the aid of my wonderful Bernina Sewing Machine, I stitched, in black, all the way around the paper. Using one of the pages which was removed from the original book, I cut a piece to make the pocket front. I tend to use the formula two thirds, one third, which is generally pleasing to the eye. Then I stitched around this again, this time using black and red thread, vary the stitch too, for interest.On the front of the Kraft pocket I stitched on some text cut out of an old book, layered with some ribbon. Next I made a text tablet with a label which I glued to a piece of black card. I then stitched the black card to the Kraft pocket with red thread. Now the Kraft pocket front is stitch to the decorative paper and the whole thing is glued to the page.
Add a 3D card decoration and Bobs your Aunty. The tag in the pocket is a rubber stamp, which I stamped and then enlarged on the photocopier.