Since hand stitching is out of the realm of possibility, I've been finding other things to fulfil my creativity! One of the things that needed doing for the City and Guilds course was to make a portfolio for the fabric manipulation samples. Putting things like ruffles and pleated fabric into a sketch book would mean they'd be flattened, which I didn't want!Well, this weekend we took a footstool in to have the cushion renewed and the solution presented itself to me in the upholstery shop! I asked the upholsterer if he had any sample books that were no longer current and, as my good luck would have it, he had three. One of them is slightly larger than A4/letter sized paper, which makes it just right for my samples.The first thing I did was to take it apart and remove all the fabric samples. There were samples that were the full width of the book and ones that were only half the width. I put the smaller ones into my "use it someday" drawer and stacked the larger ones up on my work table to use for this project.Next, I chose one of my City and Guild pieces to mount. Using my lovely new sewing machine, I stitched my City and Guilds piece to the fabric sample from the book using a zig-zag stitch. Then I folded back my piece and cut off the excess sample fabric.Since each sample from the book is reinforced with heavy interfacing and pre-punched with holes for the posts to go through, all I had to do was put my piece into the book!I mounted all my thicker pieces in this way and will add plastic sleeves to hold the paperwork and my reflections about each piece later.It looks pretty good and now the thicker samples are in the same place and won't get crushed. I still need to cover the backing paper on the inside of the covers, but I have some ideas for that already!Of course, I couldn't leave the outside of the book as it was, so I printed a collage of my work so far from the course and glued it to the front, covering up the company logo. I then trimmed the photos with Washi tape - I love Washi tape!Things like the stitch samplers work beautifully in a sketch book and there's loads of room on the page to write about each sample.  As I was making the ruffles samples and the Suffolk Puffs, I worried about how crushed they would be if I put them into the sketch book where my "flat" pieces are mounted.  I'm just so pleased that this worked out and, best of all, it was free!