EASY Fabric Journal Cover Tutorial

hi it's wonderful melinda crafts and today i'm going to show you how to make these great little journal covers are also great for covering softcover books keeping them neat and tidy so this one here has been made from just one piece of decorative fabric on the front but you can also make them from other things like we have here these ones are made from jelly roll strips now this one here is made from our foil fabric and fiber tutorial that we did a short time ago and you can also use bits of scraps and make up some covers like that's this one we start we've embroidered these are just some squares put together so anyway let's get started and show you how to make these they're really really easy so what you're going to need to do your journal cover is you'll need a journal you need some ribbon you'll want one of these type of tape measures so that you can measure around your journal and you're going to want a piece of fabric I'm using a complete piece of fabric in this one but as you can see here we've used jelly roll strips your also needs a piece of fabric for your lining and an extra piece for your flaps and then you'll also need a piece of batting now the instructions I'm going to give you apply to any book or journal that you want to cover so we take our tape measure and we line it up on the edge of the cover of our journal and we take it right round to the other cover okay so we're not taking it over this but here but just cover to cover the edge and - twelve and seven eighths I'm going to add an inch on to that and then we also take another measurement and we take it from the top to the bottom of the cover and - eight and three eighths and we're going to add an inch on to that as well when we come to cut our material let's put that aside so I've got my pieces already cut so I have my front piece here and it is thirteen and seven eighths by nine and three eighths now the second piece the piece for the tabs is the same measurement but then I cut it in half and then fold each of them in half and give them a good press because they're going to be your tabs and then I've also cut my back piece and my backing the same now with my ribbon I'm leaving it long because I'll adjust that when I finally get the thing together and how long I want them so the first thing we're going to do is take our front piece and we need to kind of find the halfway mark here so the best way to do that is just to fold it in half give it a bit of a finger prick press I'm just going to run the ribbon on either side so this one will go along here put it on the edge and then we're going to sew along each edge just to hold it in place and then I'm going to put on the other side I'm going to place this one I'm going to exactly the same thing come along the edge here back along this edge and then we'll hold that nicely in place so I'll go and do that now so you can see here that I've sewn on my ribbon and what I've also done is taken the ribbon and press them into the centers press them on the edge here just to keep them so that they're nice and flat when I come to assembling this whole thing the same on this edge just fold it back because we want those to sit nice and flat you can even if you like to keep them in place just pop a pen in there and this will all become clear as we get nearer to the step okay so what I'm going to do now is put that aside I'm going to take my tooth flaps I'm just going through on the folded edge so remember these are folded in half okay so on the folded edge I'm just going to run a seam down down the edge at about your sixteenth to an eighth and then just another seam down here just to give it a nice finish you can see here how we've done that just here just gives that a nice finish to the flap so I'll go and do that and then we'll come back and do the next step okay so I have sewn down the folded edge now on both of my flaps and now we're going to put this together so what we do is we take our piece of batting and lay it down on the table and on top of it we put our piece of lining and then we take our flaps now we put our flex with the open side towards the edge so just make sure that you have that side there coming down the edge because this is all going to get caught up in the seam so don't worry about it and the same on the other side now then I've got my front piece here I want the ribbons in the middle and I've pinned them so that they're nice and straight because when I sew I don't want those to be sort of going all ski-lift so I want them to sit nice and flat so now we're just going to pop that piece on top tuck the ribbons in and then we're going to pin it all the way around we're going to leave an opening because we want to turn this all through so we'll leave about a four inch opening but we just stick a few pins in it to keep everything together nicely while we sew and we're going to slope with a quarter inch seam and we're going to start at one opening go all the way around always three sides and then we're going to come in here and leave ourselves as I say about four inches so I'll go and do that now so as you can see I've sewn along here with the quarter inch seam no what I'd normally do is run along just sew off and then turn it round and start again on the side and come down so go all the way around with my little opening here now I've also trimmed my corners and what I do is I just snip across the corner like that and then I come in here on either side and take a little bit of bulk away and make sure you don't cut your stitching but before you cut anything off make sure that you turn it through first and see that everything's being caught up because we had so many pieces there in fact you might even find that you want to sew this with a quarter with your walking foot but it will manage on your most machines now remember we had some pins in there so you'll want to reach in there and take the pins out before you go turning this through or you're likely to stick yourself alright so I'm all set now to turn it through and I'm just going to do that comes nicely through the the opening okay so you can see that the ribbons are caught in nicely and they line up very well and I just have to push those corners out you do that to get a nice corner but I like to finish that off now because some you want to get on with this now what we're going to do is we're going to push our corners out give it a bit of a press and then we'll just top stitch all the way around so that we catch them the seam at the top okay because that's how we going to finish it off so I'll do that now and then we'll come back and show you what it looks like so just before I start sewing I thought I just might just show you something if you've case you haven't done this before what you want to do is spend a bit of time making sure that you get the opening nice and flat when you're pressing it because you're going to sew this all the way around but you just want to spend a bit of time making sure that that's all folded over and lines up nice and level okay and then because we're going to be doing about you can do a sixteenth of an inch or an eighth of an inch whatever suits you but I'm going to do about a sixteenth of an inch and I'm going to go all the way around now and what they will do it will go over and hold my ribbons and also we will close this opening so I've sewn all the way around with a sixteenth of an inch just to finish it all off and I've popped my journal into the flaps so it's all sitting nicely now on the cover now you can take the ribbons and if you want to just tie it at the side here you can cut them to length so that they just tie here but Paula likes to have the ribbons go right round so we just wrap that right around to the front and take this one round the back and bring it here and when you get to here you can just make sure they're the same length cut a bit of a V in them and tie your bow so great way for keeping your journals and your books nice and clean and pretty there we are all done now if you've enjoyed this tutorial don't forget to give us a like and subscribe to our Channel and also check out our website for more exciting tutorials and don't forget to Like us on Facebook

Channel: Alanda Craft

Views: 81,165

Rating: 4.9663863 out of 5

Keywords: alanda craft, quilting, sewing, craft, journal cover, tutorial, fabric journal, fabric project, craft project, fabric journal cover, journal cover tutorial

Id: 2U-rgDVRmDg

Length: 8min 36sec (516 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 13 2016