To begin with the latter, I have finally started Treasure Trove – yay! I’ve done the central part (apart from the cutting) and all the beading, which looks quite different but fortunately actually better than I had envisaged it. In the design there are bead motifs which have come out much denser-looking that I thought (it’s difficult to keep remembering that charted beads on paper are smaller than actual beads on fabric), and clusters of four beads which, as I was stitching them, I feared would be too bulky for where they were in the design. But the motifs actually look rather attractive with the dense coverage, and the clusters form a pleasing X shape which I hadn’t foreseen. It’s very satisfying when a design does that . Next step is to decide exactly what size to cut the metallic kid and the felt used for padding it.

So what about those CD chart packs? As Mabel’s Fancies doesn’t offer printed chart packs (not as a standard option anyway) wouldn’t it be much easier just to send the PDF chart packs by email as we do now? Why add the complication of a physical CD? Good point, and in fact the CDs are not intended to be sent out by post; the idea is that when I teach workshops or do exhibitions or things like that, I can put out a selection of these chart-packs-on-CD for people who would like to try a design at home.

So far so good. But how to put them together? I had some plastic sleeves which I thought would work, with an insert like the photographs I stick on the front of the Mini Kits, only square. One problem with that soon became apparent – the inserts need to be a little over 12cm square, so you’d have to go for 5″x7″ photographs and cut them to size; but that gets quite expensive. So how about 4″x6″ photographs cut square and then stuck onto some coloured paper, like these origami squares? Unfortunately 11.7cm would still leave quite a gap, and the next size up is too big. Time for Plan B. Why not use those paper CD sleeves with a circular window in them? A 4″x6″ photograph, cut down to a little under 5″ and inserted in front of the CD, would fill the entire aperture. One snag. As you can see below, the window doesn’t show the whole cover picture. This looks a bit sloppy.

The long-term solution is rejigging the cover pictures so that they fit a 10cm round aperture; so I had a play with the template and managed to squeeze everything into a circle. That doesn’t solve the short-term problem of the 25 covers I had printed already, but having tried a few approaches the best one is probably to stick the trimmed pictures to the sleeves so they cover the window. Not the most elegant solution, but better looking than the partly-obscured square-picture-behind-circular-aperture option. And for any future CD chart packs, I’ll use the new circular cover pictures!