Notebook cover challenge

Just because The Mermaid in Her Grotto is done, doesn't mean I've stopped stitching. Next up was my EGA chapter president's challenge. We had a small hard covered notebook to cover for this challenge. I love little notebooks and have lots around so I wanted to do something a bit different with mine. After thinking of all sorts of uses and themes, I decided on a sort of photo album. I say sort of because I ended up doing an altered book technique on the inside. I glued all the pages together around the edges and then cut a recess in the center of the stack, and glued around that. I was going to stitch some sort of 3-D thing to put inside but realized that the book and the depth was rather small and I would just get frustrated. So I ended up using vacation photos to create a scene of our latest trip to Costa Rica. For the outside I used many of the leftover threads from the Mermaid to create a stumpwork cover.
The back is a mountain waterfall, not to much depth since it is the back. The rocks are made of the boucle threads I made for the grotto rocks.

The front is real stumpwork. A couple of the leaves are wired and the toucan (with the badly shaped bill) is a slip. I used the real pieces of peacock feathers from my Mermaid kit for the body of the toucan - it seemed appropriate. The short palm tree in the lower left has fronds made of the purl purl with a silk core that is then pulled and twisted with another colour. The wire allowed me to bend back and forth and then fold to create a fringed frond. The bush in the lower right is made with GST threads.

All in all, lots of fun.

The photo below is a collection of what was in my purse!!! As I prepared to go away at the end of May I decided to clean out my purse to be sure I only carried what was needed. My husband was amazed at all that came out of my purse and decided to lay it all out for a photo. As it was, I didn't weed enough, or maybe soon enough, because the strap on my purse broke while I was away. And it wasn't really a purse, it was a small bag from Ariat normally used for horse grooming tools. So I guess that means I'm hard on purses and my shoulder.