Chelle Stein
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On My Desk Wednesdays

On My Desk: New Stitch Collage Journal in Progress

Updated September 30, 2026, Originally Published September 30, 2026. 3 min read

On My Desk: New Stitch Collage Journal in Progress
An experimental notebook on my “bed desk”.

Last week I shared some of my latest Stitch Collage backgrounds in my post about Sewing with Cats and I thought this week it might be fun to try an experiment of binding some of those backgrounds together in a composition notebook.

I haven’t quite decided yet how I’m going to actually attach the fabric pieces into the journal but I decided to get started on the cover.

To make the cover, I decided to just glue the fabric scraps on directly and then sew over later. I used a glue stick for this step.

One composition notebook, a pile of fabric scraps and a glue stick.

The glue stick worked surprisingly well although my plan after this is to actually stitch through the cardboard and get everything tacked down permanently.

Here’s how the front cover looks currently:

Front Cover of the Journal

My plan after this is to do some stitching around the different pieces of fabric to tack it all down.

Here’s the back cover:

Back cover of the journal

This is definitely experimental, but I think it will be nice to have a place to combine paper and fabric together in one journal. I will definitely keep you posted on the progress!

New Recipes Added to the Site!

In other news I added a few more recipes to the site:

  • Wimpy’s Weakness: This is my grandma’s pistachio pudding bar recipe - she liked it so much she hand typed copies of the recipe to give out to friends so of course I have to share it with you!
  • Butterscotch Bundt Rolls: Like monkey bread, but better!
  • Glorified Scrambled Eggs: My mom‘s egg strata breakfast recipe.
  • Grandma K’s BBQ Sauce: A Pittsburgh classic for ham barbecue, with a secret ingredient of instant coffee.
  • Dad’s Polish Bon Bon Cookies: After adding so many recipes from my moms side, I couldn’t leave out my Dad‘s side - this is a Huber family tradition every Christmas.

I know, I know, who’s thinking about Christmas already? Well, if you’re someone like me who makes Christmas gifts for family and friends, you might be! Don’t worry, we haven’t skipped over Halloween.

This week Ray and I actually started filming a series of Halloween YouTube shorts - yesterday we tie dyed a dress of mine to have a gothic look of red and black - I absolutely love it!

If you want to stay updated on the latest of our Halloween activities make sure you subscribe to his channel - I’m usually in most of the videos one way or another.

Ray also helped me dye some paper with our rinse water. This too is highly experimental since the chemistry of dye is complex, but I always have some old wrinkled copy paper on hand to experiment with so I figured I’d give it a try.

Ray dipping paper in our rinse water dye bath.

Conventional wisdom says this won’t work, but I’m determined to try it! It would be so fun to have the sheets for making my trifold junk journals.

Anyways, that is everything I’m up to this week - I want to see what you’re up to! You can reply to this email to share with me or post your links in the comments to share with everyone.

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