book cover tutorial

It's time for another tutorial. I made this book for Christie to keep her FHE lessons in, since she let me borrow & make copies. Anyway, I thought you could make it for lots of great uses. A journal for your kids, photo album, collection of favorite stories from the web or Christmas stories. I get so many "art" projects from my kids school and I thought this would be a great way to store them and not just toss them in a box. Just add a few clear sheet protectors and voila! Personalized coffee table book to show off how brilliant your children are.

I bought a 1 & 1/2 inch binder and started to get creative about what I could repurpose instead of buying batting. I came up with an old towel. I cut it just larger then the book. You can trim it down.

I also grabbed my bottle of spray glue (really makes this project easier!)

Here is yet another idea for a batting alternative. I found some flannel left over from a baby blanket that was the perfect thickness for what I wanted.

Spray the cover of your book and wrap the fabric abound the entire book. 

I cut the edges on the sides, but left about an inch on the bottom & top to wrap around.

Try to smooth out any air bubbles as you are placing on your batting/fabric. Spray adhesive is not so permanent with fabric you can pull it up a few times to smooth it out without loosing your stickiness.

I use spray starch to make sure my cover fabric is nice and flat.

Wrap it just like you did the batting/fabric. Use the spray adhesive to secure it to the batting/fabric (unless you are sewing an applique, otherwise you will use this as a measuring step - wait to glue until after you sew on your applique)

This time I overlapped it about an inch on all four sides to fold over.

I figured out what I wanted for an applique and figured out placement on the top of book.

I used scraps to create a tree and leaves for my applique.

I'm a crappy artist so I traced the basic idea on the back of the fabric before I cute it out.

I placed everything on the top of the book to get a good idea of how the final product will look.

I sewed enough to hold the leaves in place.

I sewed the tree in place and outlined the leaves.

This is how the backside looked with my pieces stitch to it.

I sewed on ric rac to finish the edge and frame my applique.

Next I centered my fabric and spray glued it in place.

This is how the inside looked.

I cut a piece of cardboard to fit both insides of the folder. Sprayed them with glue covered them in the main fabric.

The spray glue isn't strong enough for cardboard so I used my handy dandy glue gun for this part. Just squeezed out a ton of glue to hold it in place.

I glued the corners down & placed it over the inside cover.

This is how it looks finished on the inside.

Here is the finished product. Hope you enjoyed making it as much as I did...