 Hi, you guys! I am back with another tutorial for S-I-Y Sew It Yourself. It's the online sewing community that provides all you need to know to grow your sewing skills one project at a time. When they sent me the new Better Together collection full of positive affirmations and bright colors, my mind immediately went to these book covers I use to cover my journals. They are so easy to make and liven up any bookshelf, so let me show you how you can make them with just a little bit of fabric in about 30 minutes. All right, so with most sewing projects, we're going to start with taking some measurements. We need to measure the book or journal that we are going to cover and we're going to measure from one end around the binding or the spine of the book around to the front. So we're getting a whole measurement front, side, and back all in one fell swoop. Don't worry about being too accurate here, but I'm getting 13 inches. So we're going to write that down. We're going to do width equals 13 inches and then we need to measure our height. The height of the book is eight and a half. So we're going to do height equals 8.5. Okay, so we need to add in seam allowances. So we're going to do quarter inch seam allowances all the way around. So that's a quarter on the top, a quarter on the bottom, and then a quarter for each of the sides. So that's a half for the width and a half for the height. So plus 0.5 plus 0.5. And then we also need to factor in the width of the thickness of the cover. Some covers are thicker than others. And some are like way thinner. So I am going to account for this as probably just an eighth of an inch. Where's my measuring tape? So if I come in through here, it's roughly an eighth of an inch. Feel free to scoot that up to a quarter of an inch. If your measurements aren't exact, exact, it's going to be just fine. But I'm going to add in an eighth of an inch, which is 125. One divided by eight is 0.125 plus 0.125 for the height as well. So when we add all of this stuff together, these two numbers here are going to equal five eighths every single time. So this one is going to be 13 and five eighths. And this one is going to be nine and a quarter or nine and an eighth. Hold on. 8.5 plus 0.625 is nine and an eighth. Okay. All right. So that is our width times our height. So where for the cover, we need to 13 and five eighths by nine and one eighth. We need to cut one of the main fabrics, cut one of our lining, and cut one of our batting. All right. So I have all of these numbers and cutting instructions for you guys in the PDF. And you just want to plug in your width and your height. And then if you're doing a different seam allowance, this is adjusted. If the thickness of your book is different than this is adjusted. Otherwise you just plug in these numbers and add accordingly. All right. So that is for the outer cover. Now when we get to the inside, we have these little flaps. So we need to account for those as well. So for the flaps, the good news is the flaps have the same height as the cover. So that's nine and one eighth. And the width of the flap, I like to do a good four inch. But if your book is like super like wide this way, feel free to do more or less. But four inches is universally pretty good. So I will do four inches. And then the flaps are actually doubled over just to make it a little bit easier for us to construct this later and not have to hem this back. So that's actually four times two, which is eight. All right. So then we have to add in the five eighths that account for the seam allowances and the thickness of the book. And that again gets us to eight and five eighths. So our flaps are eight and five eighths by nine and one eighths. And we need to cut one contrast, sorry, two contrast and cut one interfacing. All right. So that is our cutter's must for this specific book. Go ahead and take your measurements and plug and play with these numbers here, the width and the height. And then this should be the same for you. And this should be the same as whatever your height is. All right. So once you have that done, then you go ahead and cut out all of your fabric and interfacing. So just like the cutter's must says, we have our outer fabric, our lining and our batting all cut at the larger rectangle. And then the smaller rectangle, we have two of the flaps that get folded in half and two pieces of interfacing. So we go to our iron and we apply the batting to the main fabric. You want to apply it to the wrong side, obviously, glue side down like so and just apply it according to the manufacturer's instructions of your fusible batting. And then for the flaps, we are going to press them in half, each of them lengthwise to give us that four inch wide flap. And then the interfacing pieces will just cover half of that. So after you get it pressed in half, fold this over and then adhere the interfacing. So let me show you what all of this looks like after I get back from the iron. Okay, back from the iron. We have our outer fabric with the fusible batting fused onto the wrong side of the fabric. We have our two flaps with half of each of them fused with the lightweight interfacing. All right, and believe it or not, we're already ready to assemble. These are super, super quick and easy to put together, but you're basically putting the flaps on the right side of the outer fabric with the folded edge toward the inside. Same thing on the other side here. Feel free to go ahead and baste all of this down if you'd like. I tend to skip that step and just go ahead and place the lining on the outside or on top of all of that, but pin around all the edges. You're going to want to leave a couple inches of a gap on one of the edges. Longer, short, it doesn't matter, but just know that you are going to be stitching that close in the end so it might be visible. So if that's important to you as to where that lands, place it, place the gap accordingly. So I'm just going to finish pinning this and then I'll take you to my sewing machine and show you the actual sewing process. All right, we are ready to sew. I'm going to start a little bit off of center just to leave room for that little gap and sew this at a quarter of an inch seam allowance pivoting at each corner. I'm going to pivot. We're just leaving our needle down, lifting our presser foot and rotating our fabric around that 90 degree angle again get to that corner with the presser foot and turn the project. We're coming back down this long end and remember to stop a couple of inches short of where you started and don't forget to back stitch there as well just so as we're tugging on this it doesn't come undone. Okay now we need to trim our corners and our seam allowances so and turn this thing right side out so I'll show you all of that from the overhead camera. Okay so we need to trim our corners close to our stitching all four of them and then trim our seam allowances. We're going back to um probably about an eighth and you can see that you know I didn't keep my seam allowances super accurate the whole time either. This is a very very forgiving project where if you don't have perfect stitches it's okay and as we get to our little gap I am just going to cut a little corner into that because it'll help us um if we leave that seam allowance at the quarter inch it'll help us later as we try and turn that under. You'll see what I mean here in a second. Okay so trim the last one here and then this is the fun part where we get to turn it all right side out so grab each corner and push it through the hole. Now grab a chopstick or a point turner whatever you've got and get into those corners and get them nice and pointy. You can see the difference of one corner versus another one whenever you use a point turner. Okay and this is what we've got so we are going to go back to the iron press this really well and as we're over there we're going to turn this little guy under and turn this guy under which is again why I wanted to keep that five eighth or that quarter inch seam allowance nice and big because it makes it easier to do this and then press that all in one and then you'll come back and either hand stitch that you can top stitch out your machine whichever you want so let me show you what that looks like. So if you want to use your machine to top stitch this you've got it pressed under and you literally just put this underneath your presser foot move your needle as far to the right as it goes and then edge stitch right along that folded edge. Okay one of the cool parts about this particular book cover in my humble opinion is that it's reversible so you can put it over your book like so or you can turn these to the other side and now the flaps are on the side of the smaller hearts just envision this with me um and then you can then your book will be like this okay so I don't know if you just get tired of things really easily if you change your mind if you decide one day you know I'm not feeling bright and colorful I'm feeling a little bit more modern you can do it either way so let me show you what this looks like on the book that I made it for eight and then just like that we have our custom little book cover how cute this one is for like little checklist to do lists and stuff and then there is the back so you can um embellish these with fabric markers you can embellish them with the um cricket sublimation pins you can do cricket iron on vinyl and really write whatever you want on the front or on the spine but if you get a collection of fabrics like we have here and they all coordinate it would just look so cute on your little bookshelf all right here's one more look at the entire collection that we have here I put this one on talks so you can read some of the saying so they have on it I think those would be so cute if you fussy cut them and made them like the center of your book or even fussy cut them and did an applique on the front so so many cute ideas with these fabrics um you have the bias like rainbow stripes stars hand prints and then these are the big and little hearts that I used the super cute rainbows and then you have like a big bold stripe here the collection does also come with a panel two panels one that looks like a flag and one is um more of the sayings so check the description box for this fabric line check the description box also for links to the pdf where you will need to download the instructions if you want to have a written set of instructions in addition to what I've done here today but those are our book covers I hope you love them as much as I do