If you follow me on Pinterest, you may have already seen that I follow a blog called Darling Adventures and that she recently did a tutorial for an adorable little journal cover. The covers are designed to fit over a composition notebook that you can get at Walmart or Target for around $1 or less. I’ve never been into diaries but I’m constantly sketching up quilt patterns and sewing notes using scrap paper and it often gets lost or damaged. After I saw this tutorial, I knew I needed to make one for me and get myself a composition book to store all my sewing notes in!
I decided to get a composition book that has graph paper instead of a lined one since I will be using mine to plan out quilts. It will be really nice to not need a ruler and be able to just draw out the patterns I want and have them be done to scale.
I thought about making a cover match my Quilted Affair logo and colors but I had some Florette Ocean fabric from the Honey Honey Collection by Kate Spain (Moda) and I am OBSESSED with this fabric. It’s so pretty! I had some left from cutting out the pieces for my Garden Fence Quilt (info on that coming soon) so I decided to use that instead. I layed out a few ideas with ribbon and extra pieces added on to see how it would look. At first I was bummed because I didn’t have enough fabric but then I realized I could just make the spine a different color!
I sewed a strip of the green between two Florette Ocean panels and then trimmed it to the size specified in the tutorial for the exterior piece.
Next I hooped up the front to add an embroidered/appliqued “A” on the front. After the machine was done, I gathered all the pieces (see the original tutorial for sizing info):
The final sewing was pretty easy but I had a hard time getting it on the composition book – I think my top stitching on the edges was a little too large of a seam allowance. I usually aim for 1/8” or less but this might have been more like 3/16”. But it still came out adorable.
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I really love how it came out, especially the little ribbon bookmark! I had planned to make a pen holder (actually I did make a pen holder piece) but I forgot to sew it in, haha. I’m actually going to make some more of these as a gift/surprise for the Alpha Phi new members so stay tuned for some more journal adorable-ness!
