Trust, Dream, Believe, Hope, Expect

I am quite enjoying expanding my embroidery skills at the moment. I have rather limited embroidery experience, with a small number of stitches only. Recently, I have been inspired to try to master some stitches that I have tried without success previously. Such as padded satin stitch. Google helped me locate Mary Corbet's 'Needle'N Thread' blog, containing some very useful hints about how to do this stitch.

What better project to try it out on then this prayer journal cover I designed as a present for a friend?

I used the padded satin stitch technique as outlined by Mary Corbet on her blog - split stitch to outline the words, then padding stitches perpendicular to the direction the final satin stitches would lay, followed by the top layer of stitching in single strand of thread.

As you can see, I am still getting some puckering, I will have to work on that! But on the whole, I am quite happy with the end result, and I hope my friend is too!