How to Make a Fabric Book Cover for your Junk Journal

hello it's dawn Michelle from boho Tarot and welcome to another journal with me so I had mentioned in the previous Alice junk journal videos that I was going to show you guys how to cover a book with fabric because we did not do that for the Ollis journal we left it as it was so for this tutorial I'm just gonna real quickly show you how we go about making this fabric covered book I'll just give you a quick peek as to what it looks like when it's created so let's go ahead and get started so to create our hardback journal with a fabric cover so that's something that I had talked about in my Alice junk journal tutorial that particular book didn't need a fabric cover because I actually liked the cover that I was using for that book but a lot of times when I create a junctional I'm using just a plain book cover like this one this is a book that came to the dollar that came from the dollar store I have taken all the insights out and ripped out those cover pages and basically just you know created this this flat working space this template so to speak now this one I did accidentally cut through the binding here which you can see I hopefully that shows up it does go actually all the way through so one of the things that we're going to do and I'm kind of glad that this happened is so that I can show you how how you would fix that when you're deconstructing a book so basically you're just gonna take some duct tape I'm gonna just tack it down here and the other good thing that this does sorry sidetracked is to reinforce this spine so this particular book is not very thick it's not it's not made really terribly well and since we would be sewing signatures and attaching fabric and paper and heavy things to this binding on the duct tape also helps to create a kind of stability for it as well it also gives it some more masa more structure so basically I just take it and I go it's roughly about there I mean we are going to cover this with fabric so it does not need to be perfect you just don't really want it to overhang too much so we're gonna gonna cut that down there and then I'm just gonna pull this down here I'm gonna cut a length of that now the one thing you do want to watch out for is not to get a ton of wrinkles in there because those will show through your fabric if you get too many wrinkles on your in your binding so that also covers where I've cut it it also serves to reinforce the spine now generally unless I'm working with a really thick heavy-duty cover like I had with the Allis Journal that was a really nice book to work with in terms of creating a junk journal but generally when I'm working with these like cheap hardback books like these dollar store ones I generally do reinforce the spine so again just going to measure a length of duct tape here and it doesn't have to be exact now this part is gonna get covered up with our binding I mean I'm not gonna actually bind this book because this is just a this is just a book that I'm using for example to show you how to create a fabric cover on a hardback book so we won't actually be doing anything with this book it's strictly for tutorial purposes so I'm going to be using all of my excess stuff so I do a strip there and I do a strip on this side as well um you generally wanna try to get things as flat as you can I over cut this one so I can just trim that off a little bit but that gives us just a nice reinforced spine generally with a spine this particularly weak I would have done this one double and it also serves to cover up whatever prynt might be on the spine sometimes there's printing on the spine and depending it on how thick your fabric is or how light your fabric is sometimes you can see through that so putting the layer of duct tape on there really helps with that if I were actually making this into a book and I was actually going to use this cover I mean which I I guess I might at some point but that's not my intention for today I would do this double layer here on the front just like I did on the inside so that's kind of how we would reinforce a spine on kind of a wobbly book it gives it some more structure it covers up any where we might have nicked the spine when we took the pages out so the next thing that we're going to do is take our fabric that we're going to use and I like I said this is just strictly for tutorial purposes so I'm just using the excess fabric that I have laying around because I don't want to use anything that's earmarked for other other projects this is some beauty in the base fabric that I have that I actually used to make my shame own a or shame or net Terra bag and it was just I had it I bought it in bulk so I hate that's what I have a lot of it now generally I would recommend after you cut your fabric you you know iron it I'm not gonna do that today just because I don't need to take the time to do that and again this is just for for tutorial purposes so we want to lay out our fabric and we want to flatten our book down as much as possible generally I would cut this white edge off which we I will do at thee after we get this cut to size but we generally want to leave around about an inch on every side of our fabric so and we doesn't have to be exact you know an inch around you can of course measure measuring is always a good thing and then go ahead and trim this off so like I said I would like this has wrinkles in it I would iron this if you're actually making a book if I which you will see and I'll go head and do it without ironing and so you can see what it looks like but you will get these wrinkles and creases in here if you don't iron it so before you go to this this point you want to of course iron your fabric first a lot of times you'll also maybe you want to wash it first because it can shrink a little bit so washing and ironing it is always good I would wash it and iron it before you cut it to size because if you cut it to size and then you wash it and iron it it may shrink a little bit and then your fabric might not be quite big enough so for this purposes we're just gonna go with it like it is so now that we have the fabric cut to size with roughly an inch around every side again this is just approximate it doesn't have to be exact the next thing that we'll want to do is we want to get a bunch of these binder clips and I like the little ones for this so we will be using those in a minute and we'll need of course fabric glue I do really like fiber attack for this particular process because this is kind of what it's what it's designed for and it works really well for this process so before we start gluing anything down the first thing that we want to do is dog-ear our corners we want to just trim them down because we don't need all that excess as you can see I'm not really measuring I'm just trimming off that excess because it'll take away some of that bulk when we go to bend it around and that will make more sense once we actually get to that point so now we have kind of this nice little shape here with our one inch around and our cropped off corners so the next thing that we're gonna do is really just start gluing this fabric down you don't really have to like make sure that your book is one way or your fabric is another way because at this point you know it doesn't really matter whether the book curves up or down you're gonna cover it all anyway so generally what I do is I start at one corner and I run a line of you across the top all the way across here and then I run a bead of glue along that inside seam just to ensure that we have we will get some glue in there and then I kind of just to a little squiggle here and we'll tack down the rest of it when we get to that point so now what we're going to do is we're going to start folding this over and pulling it tight and again like I mentioned if you watch the Alice tutorial using fabric tack if you push too hard your glue is going to seep through your fabric so we don't want to push too hard we just kind of want to smush that down a little bit okay and we're gonna kind of try to get it in those seams pretty good and we're going to use our binder clips to just very carefully clip it in place to hold it because we are going to be flipping it around and pulling on it from the other side so I always do opposite sides and this helps ensure that you're getting that tight tight binding so basically going to repeat the process here you don't want to get too terribly much glue in this inner seam here because it will seep through if you get too much go in there and now we're gonna flatten our book out so we always make sure our book is as flat as we can get it and then we're gonna start pulling that taunt as you can see I'm kind of pulling and rolling it towards me and that's going to ensure that it gets that nice tight fit and again not pushing too hard on the fabric because I can already feel where that fabric is coming through on the insides here doesn't matter a whole lot but you don't want it seeping through you know your front or where you actually will be able to see it so now we have both of those sides done the fabric does dry fairly quickly but you could leave this and let it sit for a few just to make sure that it's good and adhered before you start yanking on it the other way because I'm not actually making this a real book I'm just gonna go ahead and move forward with this process now with one of the reasons why you might want to sit and let it dry is because you don't want these binder clips in the way when you try to pull this one because if you can see here I'm not flat against my board so I'm not gonna get a really tight seal because I've got that give here so we really don't want these binder clips in the way so for right now I'm going to take them off which is generally why I would leave this and let this side these two sides kind of dry a little bit before I would go on to this part so when we get to these these last two sides then we have to contend with our corners here so some of there's a couple of different ways that you can do this you know you can do a fold and then a fold again and that gives you a really nice tight seam which is tends to be how I do it some people clip these even closer so they will clip it literally to the corner and it just kind of leaves once you fold it over it leaves just a minut little gap you can also just fold this corner in and fold it flat here and just work it through until it comes down into to be flush here you can also fold it like that as well and then you can take your scissors and clip again just to make sure that you're not having any of that overhang so generally what I do is I run a little bit of glue on this inside here and right here where my fabric is folding over itself and I'll do that on both sides and then what we're gonna do is clip this just a little bit tighter so now you can see that I've got a nice bolt there but I've not overrun and this part that's kind of I don't even know if it'll show it because it's the same color on the same color but it's not straight that's okay cuz that's gonna get covered up with our inside papers so I'm going to clip that one and I'm gonna look and see here this one is just a little over late so I'm going to clip that down there just so that it's the same and really this is kind of just trial and error so I before you actually start on a book that you want to work with I would recommend practicing on like a cheap dollar store book with some cheap fabric that you really don't care about and do a couple practice runs so that you can kind of get the hang of how this process goes and what might work best for you because everybody likes to do it a little bit differently and when you haven't done it before it can be a little bit tricky to figure it out so I recommend really recommend practicing first and I did practice on a couple of different books first those children's books from like from like the dollar stores and stuff those are great because they also they're small they don't take up a lot of glue or fabric or materials and you can practice with them so those are really great too so basically I'm just gonna repeat the process that I did before and we're gonna pull this down and I am pulling it towards me because I want to get that as tight as possible I will go back and add more glue so that this is not flopping up like this but for right now we're going to roll with it this way and I am going to go ahead and stick binder clips on these two sides here where my corners are just to keep them down and I'm going to throw under there so now I'm going to take these clips off because I don't want them anyway and we're just going to repeat the process you and then we're going to set this aside and let that glue dry really well before you move on to the next part so while this is kind of sitting here trying like I said I would recommend waiting til it's good and dry but we can go ahead and start cutting our our cover papers to size now before we add any papers to this what we need to decide is if we want a ribbon closure so if you want a ribbon closure now is the time to go ahead and do that so I'm going to take a length of ribbon just like I did in my Allis journal and I'm going to go approximately three times the length of my book which is going to be all of this ribbon um you could also do approximately two times the length of the book and that for the most part should give you enough I just like to do three just to be sure I'd rather have to cut some off and have it be too long than to have it not be long enough and to not actually work as a closure because once you glue this in you can't really get it back out it's pretty much in there so we're gonna fold it once we have our cut to size we're gonna fold it in half and then we are going to find the middle of our book now there have been many times that I forgot to put my ribbon closure in before adding my cover papers and you can fix it it is possible you just have to very carefully peel up your cover papers pretty much guarantee it's gonna ruin your cover papers but you should be able to salvage your fabric cover so you'll just have to get a new piece of paper to do your cover with and you can pull it up and then you can put your ribbon back in but it's just really not the easiest way to go about it so it's best to just kind of plan ahead and decide what you're gonna do and do you know in the proper orders so we've got this folded in half and I'm going to put it roughly in the book you can of course measure but you know me I don't really do that so I'm just gonna start with some glue in the middle here and I'm gonna go the middle of my book top to bottom and side to side and then I'm going to fold this over and just kind of press that down it's not real it's not real terribly important to watch out for seepage because you're gonna cover this up anyway this binder clip is gonna be in my way so we kind of tack that down in the middle there and then we basically just run a bead of glue kind of I just kind of do a squiggly line that is hopefully in the same spot and at this point I forgot to mention we want to glue this side down so any excess you've got hanging out over here you can go ahead and glue down again this is going to get covered with paper so it just kind of helps you to to keep things from bunching up on you is really all of the purposes so we run the glue clear to the edge over that fabric and I go about I go almost to the edge like really close to it I don't want the glue to seep on to the front of my cover but I want my ribbon to be glued down pretty well because it's gonna take a lot of wear and tear so I'm just gonna press this down and again I'm getting glue seeping through the ribbon but that's okay because this is going to be under my closure so we're gonna go and glue this excess fabric down just so it's not in our way so we don't want to create any extra bulk in our book and it would have been smart for me to glue these down first before I did that but basically you're just gonna run a line of glue under the fabric not on top of it because that doesn't do any good like I just did so then we basically repeat the process over here and you know try to keep things as straight as possible so there we have that glued down and again ultimately you want to sit and let this dry really well before you move on to the next part so once we have our ribbon down and our fabric adhered basically what we want to do is create our cover pages now if you're doing a fabric binding like I did with the Alice junk journal where as your fabric is going to cover overlay part of your papers so it is to see here just for a reminder so we have our fabric over laying our paper here our cover pages and that is totally just if you want that particular look if you don't want that particular look and you want your fabric to be under your pages you would of course glue your signature in first and then glue your cover page on top of it but I like this little bit of fabric I think it adds texture it gives some more some more layer and definition to the book and I just think it looks really pretty so that's how I do it but if you didn't like that fabric seen showing here you could glue your your book block in and then lay your cover page over the top of this binding so if you were doing that you would basically just hold off on the rest of this cover until you had all of your inserts done and then you would come back and finish up with where we're going to go from here so I just wanted to point that one out so you know just just in case because everybody likes to do it a little bit differently so at this point what we're going to do is and I'm gonna have to just move these binder clips out of the way and hope that everything is glued down enough that it's to stay for our purposes so with my whole point to that being if you're going to have the fabric over lay your pages your cover pages do not need to go all the way to this edge and in fact it's better if it doesn't because fabric bends a lot better than paper does paper after a while of bending and bending and bending will eventually start to kind of give and it does have the tendency to tear so another kind of plus for doing the fabric binding over the top of your paper is that it just adds that stability and like I said fabric will take a bend for a lot longer it's a lot more forgiving and a lot more sturdy than paper is so if you're doing the fabric binding over the top you basically just want to get like you know fairly close to your edge but you don't want to hit your your bend here your spine so ours is bending right about there so I would probably just go right about to about here we want to use the black let's use the colored side that shows up a little bit better anyway it doesn't really matter cuz again we're just doing this for for tutorial purposes so at this point basically what I'm going to do is I want to get my cover pages pretty close to the end of my book I'm gonna leave it I think it's like approximately a centimeter you know me I just I wing it so I'm gonna put it right about where I want it and then I'm going to go I want to sit right about here because my fabric you know theoretically is going to cover into my binding here pour over my paper there so I'm gonna say that's about where I want it and I will do measurements after I figured that out because I do need to cut two pages about the same size so I want it to go right about here and you can see I've left about the same amount there and I'm just going to measure right about here and there's my measurements now we're gonna move this away so this is basically we need to make - what is this use my board I always always forget to use my board so it is this one is roughly five and a half by nine so R which means this is probably a six by nine book so you could also take your ruler and measure and say I want to go right about here so accounting if you go to the edge of your ruler you can see that it's about a half a centimeter or so so five and a half puts me right about here and again leaving a little bit of space on either side nine inches puts me about there so you know however if it works it makes sense for you however you want to go about it my first cut is gonna be there so I'm gonna make another cut here and I'm just kind of going down and giving myself a couple of marks and you can see that using this one sheet of twelve by twelve scrapbook paper I can get both sides of my cover so that's really great especially if you want you know to have the same pattern you could also use two different sheets and get two different patterns on either side that totally works either way so I always want to use my straight side I think I've said this a million times before I always want to use the straightest side to make my first to line up with so that I and making sure that I'm getting a nice clean cut every time so now that we have both of our sites cut and this particular paper gave me you know because it had a gradient on it I've got different colors on different sides it's kind of cool I think I'm gonna switch them around does it really matter nope but it's just because so now what we basically want to do is double check that we cut these correctly and that everything's lining up the way we want it to now here I am actually pressing pretty hard because it's not gonna the glues not gonna see through this paper and I want to make sure that it is pressed down there really well also if you had a book that had rounded corners and you know you went ahead and rounded the corners you could Brown the corners of your papers too but this book has square corners I'm keeping them square I'm gonna make sure to press those corners down really well and press down where my ribbon closure is and then we do the other side and there we have our fabric covered book so now you can see that's upside down doesn't really matter it would have mattered I should have mentioned that if this pattern if this paper had a particular pattern or an image on it you would of course want to make sure that your book is upright or your fabric is upright if it also has a certain pattern or direction to it and then your papers you know you know make sure that those are upright too because this is not a patterned paper it doesn't really matter I can go either way with it and it works just just as well either way so now we have our book covered in fabric with our inside covers and our ribbon closure so this is pretty much the whole process now at this point if you work course making a book you know you can see that if you had that fabric the fabric spine for your signatures like we did in the Alice junk journal you know you could take of course this is what not work but if you had your signature sewn to your fabric you can see that you would lay your fabric binding over the top of this your signatures would of course be sewn into the middle in a small book like this you'd probably only do one maybe two at most and then you would glue this down over the top of your cover like we did with the Alice journal so then that covers up all of this you know kind of ugly stuff all the seams that you got going in there if you were doing you know a different type of spine you can still do this if you wanted to glue your fabric and then you wanted to do a hard spine just a free-floating spine of its own you could also do that as well you could glue this fabric over the top you know and do the your spine glued directly to this rather than having the fabric in the spine all in one like we did with the Allis journal that is a totally an option as well you could do a really thick one you know it doesn't have to be if I kind of fold this in it doesn't have to be thin it could be a really thick one and you could have lots of fabrics overlaying and just have a little bit of paper here or you could also do you know fabric instead of paper fabric is a little bit harder to get these nice straight edges with it's not impossible it's not impossible but it is a bit harder so I tend to use paper on the inside fabric on the outside then I have my fabric spine you know right there so that is basically the whole process of covering a hardback book with fabric you could also do you know some decoration as well add some bits of you know lace or additional fabric but the big thing is just really to make sure that you get that fabric that fabric covered on there you get it on there tight and if you're going to do a ribbon closure it's important to do your ribbon closure before you put your cover pages your cover papers on the inside so that is pretty much that whole process so thank you so much for joining me for this tutorial of creating a fabric cover on your hardback books I hope you enjoyed this video and if you have any questions please let me know in the comments below I look forward to seeing you again soon for more creative Tarot for an inspired life

Channel: Boho Tarot

Views: 9,702

Rating: 4.9466667 out of 5

Keywords: tarot journaling, tarot junk journal, how to make a junk journal, tarot journal

Id: VURWAfpr55c

Length: 31min 29sec (1889 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 14 2019