Felt Collage Book Cover

I thought I would make a new book cover from felt off-cuts that I've saved. I used a piece of interfacing cut a little bit bigger than I needed for the front and back, and started adding the pieces of felt using exaggerated stitching in contrasting colours. When it was finished, I cut it to size and made the strap and flap for closing the book and attached them with the sewing machine. Then I made the pieces for the inside sleeves, cut them to size and attached them using my sewing machine too. This is the inside front sleeve, I made it stiffer by sewing lines up and down the felt:

This is the inside back sleeve, I used strips of blue and green felt offcuts and overlapped them and added detail with the sewing machine:

After I'd attached the sleeves, I sewed blanket stitch around all the edges with sewing thread, to finish it off. This is the back of the book cover:

This is the front with the flap open:

This is the finished cover with the flap and delrin clip closed:

I'm pretty much done with flickr now, the latest changes have made it too difficult for me to use, apart from the dreadful claustrophobic 'design', the white on black messes with my eyes and causes a lot of vision problems. I'll still check there for comments etc, but all my new uploads will be on ipernity:
http://www.ipernity.com/home/zedster01  It's a nice site and easy to use.

Folder Cover and Hat Template

A few years ago, I made some fabric collages. I didn't do anything with them for a long time, but eventually they all became notebook covers. I had one left, a large blue one:

On a whim, a few days ago I decided to make a cover for a ring-binder out of it. It wasn't quite big enough, but luckily after a bit of a search, I found some of the backing fabric I'd sewn the collage onto. I used this to make the front sleeve. But first, I used a spare piece of the collage to make a little pen holder.

I used an offcut for the back sleeve.

I used some nice braiding I got a while ago for the straps, and hand stitched the edges with regular sewing thread, and little blanket stitches.

The other thing I worked on this week was making a hat template. I had the same one for years, but when I cut my hair, it was too big, I have another, but I've worn that in the garden, so I used it to make a template. It was a bit like tracing around a lampshade or coffee cup to make a template, I had to roll it...and then squash it, and  bend it :) Eventually I had what looked like my hat. Using Photoshop, I went over the curves with the circular selection tool and drew lines between the edge to where the top curves intersected. Just to make sure it was even, I copied one half, flipped it over and joined the two halves.

Now, all I have to do is find the time to make it :)

Fabric Notebook Cover and Studio Challenge

I've finally made a start on a couple of pieces for Karen's 3rd Quarter Mixed Media Challenge on The Felting and Fiber Studio site. I chose two different types of background, the first one is a 7 x 5 inch art board, I think it is meant for watercolour paints. These are boards with a textured paper surface.

I covered this with Weldbond glue then added some cotton scrim, I added some Golden gel medium and added some more scrim, making creases, gathers and folds. Then I covered it in Gesso.

The next background is hardboard, the same kind of thing pegboard for workshops is made out of. I got some 8 x 6 inch pieces cut years ago for making polymer clay mosaics.

I covered this in Weldbond glue, added a layer of scrim, then glued another layer of scrim on top. I covered this in Gesso too. They are both almost dry, waiting for me to forget to finish them ;)

I finished another fabric collage notebook cover last week. This is a small A6 one. This is the front:

And this is the back:

I used some flowery fabric to line the inside, and used the sewing machine to attach the flaps, then hand-stitched blanket stitch around all the edges.

It's probably not quite as effective as zig-zagging with the machine, but it's helps stop the fabric fraying.

Fabric Collage Notebook Cover

I had 3 more pieces to finish before I could put my sewing stuff away. They are all notebook covers made from fabric collage pieces I made a few years ago. I thought it was a waste to have them all rolled up and put on a shelf out of the way. I managed to get the parts that needed to be machine stitched all sewn up, and now I just need to finish off the edges by hand. I did finish one yesterday. It was from a collage of autumnal rusty colours. It's mostly fabric, but has some art yarns sewn in too. I used some braid and delrin clips to make a closure.

This is the back:

I had a really nice fabric piece that I'd used as part of the collage piece and used this for lining to hide all the stitches:

I thought I'd have a few pictures of the other part finished pieces, but it's been raining and been really dark, but they were made from multi coloured collages. Hopefully they'll be finished over the weekend, but here's a supermacro just because :)