My fabulous journey with Mary Ann Moss on her Remains of the Day course is going very well.

I've made four Shabby Journal covers without spending a single euro on materials. Everything comes from my hoards of paper and souvenirs and fabrics.

I think of this one as my 'practise' journal. Things went wrong and had to be patched over but, as Mary Ann says, 'Everything can be fixed. Everything.'

And so it was. I struggled with my punch, my drill, my waxed thread... Here's how the cover looks. Very late last night I sewed the signatures into it, thinking I could sleep peacefully having achieved that. But no, my mind was busy for hours with ideas for more covers, more pages, more shabby inventing.

These pages were made from (on the left) old French schoolbooks, a sticker from an orange, a piece of embroidery from a birthday card and a transparent envelope which once held a posh bookmark. On the right, quite a plain page made from a poster for a show at the Tate Gallery in London, a ticket from Hugh's new Australian hat (I added the purple ribbon), part of a 57-year-old book's dust cover and a book mark from Peru with a hand-sewn felt picture.

These pages look rather empty but I want to leave plenty of space for adding more scraps and lots of writing.

I still have heaps of pages ready to go. The effects of this class are on-going. There's no reason why I shouldn't make many more. I've already had an order from Hugh for a larger one to his own specifications!

Click on the pics!