A Lovely Day at the Oxford Bodleian & A Free Give Away

It was one of those magical days today - dear friends had arranged for me to have a very special private guided tour of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It goes without saying that I have a great love for books and to see some of the very first books placed on shelves as they were meant to be with the binding to the wall and the page edges facing outwards in library halls with the most amazingly decorated ceilings was a spell-binding experience for me. We also toured the underground stacks and saw the ever-moving delivery system that guided the books from the stacks to their requisite destinations and readers above. The cherry on the icing on the cake was a visit to the Conservation Department to see work in progress on velvet bound volumes belonging to the time of Henry VIII. This is extraordinary work requiring the liaison between many talented people with understandings of books, paper, hide, cloth and metal. One thing I saw which might be useful to us all was the use of subtely coloured silk to back linen. It was astonishing to see how the linen came alive - it no longer looked flat - and I thought if new samplers worked on linen could be backed with silk in a similar way how much richer, more varied and more interesting the unfilled areas would appear. Maybe you can experiment with some scraps at home? And because I have had such a wonderful day, how can I not share it with you, particularly since I was kindly given two copies of the Bodleian Library's Textile and Embroidered Bindings? So there is a copy for one of you - just post a comment to say what your stitching dream would be and we'll put the comments in a hat and choose someone to whom we'll send this book.