Books, binders.. and adventures with the embroidery machine

So, book making is my new thing. After seeing Kirstie Allsop making gorgeous leather bound notebooks before Christmas, I scoured eBay for suitable leather and had a go myself, with a bit of pyrography thrown in for good measure.


That's the back, by the way!

But leather may not be to every ones taste and sewing through it us very hard on the fingers- in fact pliers are essential and the other day I stumbled on a sketchbook tutorial where the pages are sewn in by machine. Genius! I never knew you could sew through a stack of paper, but you can. And these little babies are so easy to make, it actually took me more time to embroider the design on to them than make the rest of them.

What you need:
A piece of fabric for the cover.
A piece of fabric for the lining.
Some iron on interfacing.
A fair handful of A4 paper.

Firstly, make your pages. take four sheets of paper, fold in half and tear along the fold, then fold in half again and sharpen the edge with a ruler, flute cleaning rod..whatever you have to hand! You want to make five of these paper booklets.

Next to the cover. Cut your cover and lining into a rectangle 27cm by 18cm. Cut your interfacing 15cm by 16cm. Now, on the first notebook I made I used a piece of extra heavy interfacing, on the second two I used four pieces of medium weight just ironed on top of each other. It was just what I had to hand, the scraps I had left over. Iron your interfacing central onto the back of the cover piece of fabric until its as stiff as you like.

Then pin your lining material to your cover, right sides facing and sew around three edges using the edge of your interfacing as the guide. Clip the corners and turn the right way around, then press to sharpen the edges and secure your interfacing back in place. Fold the open edge in and press down too, then top stitch all the way around.

Then the fun bit. Fold your cover in half to find the centre, open out one of your booklets and align the folds. Then just sew down the middle. Close this booklet and grab your next one, push it up close to the first, open it out and sew down this one continue in a similar vein. you want two booklets on either side of the central one. It takes a bit of practise, I must admit that some of my lines are a little wonky. Maybe next time I'll use a dark coloured thread instead of white against a denim! But hey-ho. I have two lovely new notebooks.

While we're on a bookmaking/writing theme I decided to tart up a couple of my binders which had suffered at the hands of a three year old with a ball pen. Having half a metre of denim floating around this seemed to fill the purpose. Denim is my new material of choice in case you hadn't gathered, especially now I have a machine which isn't scared of the prospect! And my embroidery machine seems to be very favourable towards it too.
So to make a binder cover.. open out your binder and place it on the back of the material and drawer around it, and measure out about six inches or so from each side edge to make the flaps. Cut out adding a half inch or so extra as a seam allowance (I apologise for switching between metric and imperial in this post!)
Hem the edges of the flaps then fold them inwards, right sides facing, using the line you drew around the binder as your guide. Pin in place, then sew in place along the line. Clip the corners, then turn the right way out and press. This just leaves you with a raw edge along the centre of the top and the bottom. Now there will be tidier ways to do this I'm sure, but its not exactly an item of heavy wear, so all I did was to snip down the edge of the flap to the binder line, fold the material over, press and sew.

Then you're done. Takes about fifteen minutes. Could this be a line of matching stationary??

Take Care. xx