Book Review - Fabric Art Journals

I found out about this book from a guild member and after seeing Soulemama's book she had posted, I had to take a look myself at Fabric Art Journals by Pam Sussman. It's a beautiful book that tells you how to make your own Fabric books.

I think this book is written for people who already do some bookbinding and want to get into using fabric instead. It's really heavy on quilting basics and really light on bookbinding basics. There are some terms which she throws around that don't have definitions but you can figure out on your own.

There's a really extensive section on embellishing using tea dying, image transfers, embroidery and using beads and buttons. Each section gives you a lot of options to generate the effect that you would want.

The projects that are in the book all deal with different ways to bind your book ranking from easy to difficult. All the instructions have simple figures and I found I could follow them fairly easily in my head.

At the very end is the gallery which showcases a variety of artists books which are all stunning. It's a really beautiful book that goes into lots of detail and shows a lot of ideas that you can do with your fabric books.

All in all, the projects in the book are really beautiful and has tons of ideas for what you can do with fabric books. Most of the fabric books are small art quilts rather than something sentimental which could be made for other people (which is what I could see my self doing with these), but I think it would be really easy to translate the ideas from the book into a "story".

P.S. Soulemama's fabric book can be found in the September archive

P.P.S I apologize for the crappy pictures - taking pictures at night, flash, and really glossy paper is not a good combination