Brooke's Books Stitcher's Alphabet Book Finally Finished

I am very excited to be able to show you this FFO.  So excited I didn't even want to wait until 10th July and Rachel's FFO Gallery!

I started this way back in August 2015 as part of The Alphabet Club.  For 26 months I stitched one block per month and then planned to finish it into a cloth book.

I stitched it on an afghan fabric which I cut into a long thin piece.

Here are the individual pages of the book:

I actually finished the stitching in September 2017 and there it sat until this year when I decided to add it to my WIPocalypse and actually fully finish the thing.

The first thing I did was add a title - My Alphabet Book, a bar code and an ISBN to the back:

And, yes, that is a real ISBN.  Look it up and see why it is appropriate.

The barcode also matches that book as close as I could make it.

Then came the tricky part, sewing it together.  What I did was fold over the top edge along the thicker woven part and whipstitched the top of the first page to the top of the page with D,E,F and G.  Then whipstitched the page with H,I,J and K to L,M,N and O.  and so on.

Then I turned it over and did the same with the bottom of the book pages.

Then I cut four pieces of thin card to size and slipped one inside each page, the openings are at the spine end of the book.  Finally I took the two half pages from the beginning and end of the alphabet and whip stitched them to the page with X,Y and Z.   The orange selvedge marker makes a nice line down the centre of the back of the book.

I took some video footage to show you. 

This one shows a little bit more of how the book is constructed:

If you want to stitch the Alphabet yourself, the charts can all be found for free on Brooke's website here - Brooke's Books Freebies

Finally, the Summer Blog Hop.  Anyone want to do a Summer Blog Hop this year?  I thought we could do a Know Your Blogging Friends Hop.  I allocate you the name of a fellow blogger and you make a post about them, showing something you think they would like to stitch.  Could be something you have stitched or something you found online you think they would like to stitch.

So, for example, if you got me as your Blogging Friend you would write a post about my Blog Hops and show a dragon design (or 2!).

To take part, leave a comment here.  I'll take sign-ups through to the 28th July and then allocate names with the posts going up on 8th August (It was my Nana's Birthday).