Airmail Needlebook

I had some of this duckcloth leftover from when we spruced up my husband's office last summer. I had dyed it with coffee as a background for some aquatic specimens he wanted to display resulting in a very sturdy and mottled looking fabric. Fast forward to this past winter when I got to thinking how much it resembled an old letter. I began stitching on it without a whole lot of thought about what it might become, just wanting to play with the idea of transforming it into a weather beaten envelope.

All the stitching was done with a satin cotton floss and the stamp itself is a little scrap of Liberty tana lawn (tacked down with back stitch and a smidge of Fabri-Tac along the edges). For the envelope design on the back, I simply used an actual envelope as my pattern.

After that initial thought, the project got lost in a pile of "to dos" until I came upon this fabric, Airmail Stripe in Garden by Suzy Ultman for Robert Kaufman Fabrics. IT HAD TO BECOME BINDING. IT JUST HAD TO! Poifection, right?! I wasn't yet sure if this would turn into a mini quilt, coaster, or draft for a larger quilt. Then along came my first foray into teaching embroidery classes this past month and I soon realized that a pin cushion was just not going to be something I could easily haul and keep track of on the go. A needlebook was the obvious choice!

Still thinking about how I might adapt this design idea to become a lap-sized quilt/embroidery pattern

I pulled the notebook paper fabric from my stash along with the white felt and voila—pocket storage and a place for pins and needles of all sorts! As a finishing touch I tacked the baker's twine into the binding and used it to the secure the book shut with a vintage button from my collection on the front. I love having something special to take to classes and hold my most treasured tools on the go.

Necessity is indeed the mother of invention! Do you have any projects that start with a burst, then sit on the back burner until you find a way to make it work another use altogether? Sometimes you just need to wait for that perfect fabric that makes all the difference in the end!