project #5: flower basket book

Project #5! I made this little baby out of stuff I just had at my house, some of it for years. I was digging through my craft closet that's now in my brother's room (it used to be mine before I went to college) and I found four little strawberry baskets. You know, the kind that strawberries come in at the store (or at least they used to. I think they all come in those clear plastic boxes now...). I cut one up so that instead of one box I now had 4 sides and a bottom all separate. I thought the sides looked like a little fence or a basket (which it was, so that makes sense) and that was my inspiration.

The flowers are made out of scrap fabric. The blue one is from fabric I had left over when I re-covered the chair in my room at school; the white was given to me by Janet Nelson—her daughter Emily was working for a woman at the time who designed and dyed fabric. They bought all the fabric white, but embroidered with thread made out of different material, then when they dyed them the fabric and the thread came out different colors, depending on what the each was made out of. It's a pretty cool idea, and one that I've been meaning to play with a little myself; the floral pattern was left over from when I made some cloth napkins out of a sheet I bought at a thrift store (and used for my DIY party); and the gray was from the sweatshirt lining of a jacket I got from my aunt and made into a skirt. The actual fabric flowers themselves were made from a great tutorial I found online and were going to be made into a garland for my DIY birthday party but it just didn't get around to being made. And thus the flower basket book was born!

I like the flowers because they make the cover really 3-D and substantial. The cover itself is made from a brown grocery bag which I folded over itself a couple times to make it thicker.

All the folds lead to two little pockets being formed in the front and back covers. If you look back at the first picture you can see that I included a little brass brad closing attachment on this one too so that nothing would fall out of the pockets and get lost.

The pages themselves are pretty uninteresting, again paper left over from a previous project. I think they were the trimmed off remnants from a larger book. I thought about using the flower stamp that I used in the last three books to stamp at least the first page, but decided against it. Sometimes blank pages are ok. Maybe the book would be good for a garden journal or something. You could keep little packets of seeds in the cover pockets and sketch ideas for flower bed lay-outs or write down things you learn about how to make your plants grow better. ❀