My First Textile Book of Scraps

Today I am sharing all the pages of a book project that falls (to me) in the category of “book art”. It can’t be mass produced, it is not meant to be read (in the traditional way anyway) and it is a one of a kind object, like a painting or a sculpture. Although each of the pages takes probably a lot longer than most paintings to create, it is a small book not for sale.

I call this little art book, with its eclectic pages filled with so many stitches, iHanna’s “Textile Book of Scraps”. I started these pages many years ago to go inside a vintage book cover that I found at second-hand book sale.

The cover is plain brown, but I like that the title of the dictionary is Ordlista över svenska språket, “List of words in the Swedish language”. It is my first language, and maybe textile speak and creativity is within that first language as well, even though I share my creativity in English.

The textile pieces in this book are kind of randomly chosen by me, as I went along, and they were not very planned. Or each page is planned, but as a whole it kind of came together in the end I’d say.

I wanted pages that felt harmonious and like color washes, but of course they all have meaning to me in different ways. And the entire book is definitely a sampler of my style, what I like in terms of patterns, color and stitching. You can tell who I am and what my textile evolution in the past couple of years has looked like (if you can interpret it).

There are five spreads in this book, so let’s have a look at all of them. The first one is pink:

The first spread includes a piece of lace from my maternal grandmother’s mother’s night gown that I kept around since I was a kid. And a heart, the symbol of love.

The second spread includes a lot more stitching boro-style, also using silver threads. Hand dyed (painted) pieces of fabric as well as a mini doily (gifted) with the cutest little embroidery of a flower bouquet in a basket (something I could never do myself) to the left and a little image of an angel to the right (it’s from the beginning of my textile journey where we did print and iron on images).

The pages tell me a story, and I think you can hear it too if you were to flip though the pages, touch them, stroke them.

I could, of course, say something about each of these pieces of fabric. How I love the shiny texture of the silk-like fabrics, where I got each piece, how I decided to include what (if I did remember that, but it might be best left in the past).

I could tell you so much about these pages.

How much I like patterned fabrics (flowery and polka dotted the most), but know that stitching on top lends itself best to plain fabric bits. How I try to vary what I add in. How I compose these textile collages by auditioning my little scraps. How almost none of these were stored as big pieces, folded on a shelf, but as little scraps in a big box of left-overs. How much I love working with the bits as they are found in that box. How I love including my treassures, as well as the mundane.

How I crocheted that pink flower (above) for a bag back in 2006 and it’s been floating around my stash since then to finally (finally!) find a home on this page. A resting spot, a growing ground. One of many pink flowers in a life long mission of pink flowers.

How it all started with muted colors, beiges and browns, but then not able continue to be about earthy colors. As it often happens for me. Instead the textile pages went on to be an entire forest of greens, pinks and purples. Because it was impossible to stay down. To be somber. To be calm in a storm of beautiful scraps.

To, in the last spread, be all about silver stars, dancing frogs, that tiny little deer, topped of with a baby pink zigzag ribbon that I was once gifted in happy mail. So many little bits that come together, like magic. Like the magic of art.

Those are the spreads. Here’s the beginning, lined with my paternal grandmother’s table cloth and a photo of her as a young woman…

…and the last page, in blue hues – because it is ending in blues one way or the other.

I started this textile book many years ago, and before I bound the pages together I started another similar project. It was the textile idea of a Journal of Stitchery, that I made together with my mom. Mom’s journal is already finished of course, while my pages are scattered somewhere around here, and I need to find all the bits (the pages, the spine piece and the cover) and put it all together. Once I do that (next year probably) I’ll photograph all the pages, to share how the finished thing looks as well. But while working on the Journal of Stitchery I re-found a couple of these pages and decided to stitch a few more pages and make it into a book inside the cover I had already picked out for size. So here we are, and at least one book is done. A textile book of Scraps.

I bound the textile pages into the book cover using neon pink thread. Here it is in a pile of previously finished junk journals, all with paper pages but with the textile scrappy covers I love creating so much:

I love textile books and have admired people making similar things for a long time, so I am glad to have put together my first one. I don’t think it will be the last one I make as I am already looking forward to start creating pages for a third one.

I was inspired by the book Textile Collage by one of my favorite textile artists, Mandy Pattullo. If you too are interested in textile experimentation and old quilts, I recommend her books as they are filled with inspiration and great examples.

This post is part of NaBloPoMo where I write 30 blog posts in November. Thanks for reading and leaving me a comment, it encourages me to keep going. To follow along subscribe to blog posts via email or RSS. I also have a sweet Substack Newsletter about art, craft and creativity that you might want to sign up for so that we can keep in touch in the future. I’d love that. On instagram I’m @ihannas and on YouTube Studio iHanna. Take care and stay creative friends.

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