Fat Quarter Friday: Book Cover

Lately I've been trying to cook more, so that means looking at my recipe book more. Only, my recipe book is a nasty photo album from the dollar store - not very attractive. So, I decided to dress it up. One of my favorite parts of going back to school was covering textbooks in paper bags. I used the same pattern, only with fabric!

Materials:
Book you want to cover
1 Fat quarter
Hand sewing needle and thread
Felt, tacky spray, and embroidery thread (optional)

Step 1: Take your fat quarter, iron it, and give it a nice clean 1/4" hem all the way around. (I fold mine under twice so it looks cleaner.)

 Step 2: Lay out your fabric wrong side up and fold the top and bottom in toward the middle until your fabric is about 1/4" bigger than your book. There needs to be at least 2" of extra fabric coming past the sides of your book. Also, make sure the book is centered on your fabric.

 Step 3: I wanted to put a little felt applique on the spine of the book, so I printed out some letters to use as a guide. I then used the tacky spray to get them to stick to where I wanted them while I sewed them on with the embroidery thread.

 Step 4: Now we're actually going to attach the cover to the book. This part was hard to take pictures of, but it's really pretty easy. When you've got your book laid out on the fabric like in step 2, you're going to pick one of the sides to start with and fold the extra fabric around the edge of your book. You want to slip the edge of the cover of the book into the little folded area of your fabric (think of it like a book jacket). To ensure that mine wouldn't slip around, I tightly tied some embroidery thread in between the two hemmed edged that showed up on the cover. You don't have to do this, but I found it to be helpful. Once you've got your one side done, repeat on the other side. You won't be able to do the embroidery thread thing on the other side, but that's ok.

 Step 5: Now when you close up your book it should look something like this. At this point I was a little worried that it wasn't secure enough, so I decided to hand sew the four parts around the book where the fabric comes together on the corners of the cover. You can see two of those corners in this picture. I tried to take a picture of me actually sewing that area, but my old camera can't focus in that close.

 Now you're all finished! Although I think it looks a million times better than it did, I think that the felt word on an already busy pattern makes it a little hard to look at, but at least it doesn't say photos on it anymore!