Six hours of stitching until the early hours of today and I'm much happier with my cover.

After some discussion with Frances, who's teaching the class, I had decided to try doing my stitching with beads but I found that it just didn't work. Visually, and physically, the beads brought the stitching too far forwards when I was aiming for it to be the background. So I undid my test stitching and began with just thread and was much happier.

Much of today is spent assembling the book by adding pages and binding and then starting to look at what I want to go inside.

I don't have a particular theme for the book, apart from colour and pattern, but have brought lots of inspiring trimmings with me and so start playing around with layout and design. There are so many ways you can decorate your books and not only do we have Frances here to help us along with lots of samples she has brought for us to look at, we also have her great book. I adore books and especially love self-published ones and this has got to be one of the best books I've ever seen. Not only is it filled with useful information the layout and design is inspiring and serves as samples for you to drool over.

This book is meant to be a long-term project but I'm looking forward to diving in and beginning work on some of the pages.