Rediscovering Cross Stitch

Way back in the middle school days, I took an afterschool class in cross stitch.  I remember enjoying it, but quickly dropping it since it wasn't exactly the cool thing for a 13 year old girl to be doing in her spare time!  Years passed and I decided to give a stamped cross stitch blanket kit when I was pregnant....never finished it.  See a pattern here?!  I always liked it, but seemed to lack the motivation to take it further.

In my never ending quest to be buried alive by books, I picked up the hilarious book Makoto's Cross-Stitch Super Collection.  It is so funny and full of small charts that are funny and simple enough for a beginner x-stitcher such as myself, as well as some modern project ideas.  Anyway, I've done a couple of the charts for little things like bookmarks and then while flipping through it one day, was inspired!

I had been in a bit of a slump and had to make a book for the One Tiny Book swap over on Craftster, and this seemed a perfect time to attempt to combine fabric and paper!

The base of the book is a 3" by 3" children's board book that i covered in scrapbook paper.  Edges are painted due to my lack of skills with the Exacto knife, but the color was a perfect match straight out of the bottle!

My partner was the lovely hgddm and she had a wonderful Pinboard full of nautical stuff.  Each page is wrapped in jute twine that I picked up at the good ole Dollar Tree.

Isn't the crab great?!  Too funny!

My favorite:  the shark!!!

...and the front and back cover, octopus is yet another Dollar Tree Treasure!

This project was VERY time consuming due to all the stitching and waiting for glue and paint to dry, but absolutely worth it!  I will definitely do it again with another theme in the near future :)