Embellishing a book cover - and some recycling experiments

This is a book cover I made yesterday for a friend - it's basically made out of wool fleece and yarn ends punched on organza, then embellished with doodles in free machine embroidery. The lining consists of a red, middle weight acrylic felt, like used for place mats.

I inserted a normal A5 blank book, which can of course be changed when used up.

The edges of the cover were left uncut and so uneven as they came with the punching - I then adjusted the lining to it with a free motion stitch and cut the lining borders accordingly.

Today I spent the morning on some recycling experiments:

This one is a sample where I have woven in random scraps found on my working table (different kinds of fabric, yarn, wool, threads ...) in a weave of red wool yarn - and then punched it (from both sides) with the embellisher.

As I cut the edges clean, I realized that the cut-offs would make interesting stripes for other projects ...

The second one is a sample consisting of two thin layers of white wool fleece with tiny scraps of fabric inbetween - almost transparent, yet the colours shining through.

This could make an interesting background for embroidery, I thought - and it would also be thin enough to be further punched onto another background ...



The third one are actually two variations on a recycling spinning experiment (using my drop spindle, of course!):

- one single thread spun with orange&pink roving combined with small scraps of other colours of fleece and thread -

- and one using black wool fleece for the base, adding scraps of wool, threads, yarn and even tiny pieces of fabric, all found on my working table (yes, it's quite clean now ;-).

Finally, I plied the black yarn with a rayon silk thread in order to stabilize it and also for finding out how this opposite twisting would influence the look of it (I'm not so experienced with spinning yet ...).

For those of you wanting to try out drop spinning, there are some tutorials on YouTube, this one for example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gXTWgMeMgI&feature=PlayList&p=DF33272B3994910C&playnext=1&index=13

I also found a small one-woman-company in the U.S. selling a quill supported hand spindle called "Spindolyn", which looks quite clever and interesting - this is the link: http://www.knittinganyway.com/

Does anyone of you have experience with this?<