Fabric Journal Cover

I’ve spent the last several days stitching this cover, so I’m quite pleased that it is now in finished form. While stitching I debated on how I wanted to finish my book, and I’ve decided to do it as a coptic bound style (or at least as close as I can get without having actual signatures).

I started out with a piece of natural coloured cotton fabric that has an interesting weave and tea dyed the entire piece. My plans were to do Free Motion Embroidery (FME) on the piece, but wasn’t sure how ‘full’ I was going to end up stitching it. In the end, I ended up covering the entire piece, but since I do have a few random threads apparent here and there, I’m glad I decided to do a quick dye to start. This is the before and after of the dyeing using a couple of tea bags in a couple of cups of water:

While my fabric was drying, I designed the cover. Going with my letters theme, I printed out ‘abc’ in large type using the Ballpark Weiner font. I transfered the outline of the font to my working design copy and then built the frame around it. In this copy, I still had the binding seam allowance as I hadn’t fully decided how I wanted to finish the binding at this point.

Once the fabric was dry, I fused the fabric to a piece of unbleached cotton for stability and traced the design onto the right side of the fabric using dressmakers’ transfer paper. Because of the weave I also did a quick running stitch along the transfer lines so that they were easier to see. This gave me a boundary as to where I need to FME so that I didn’t waste a lot of effort stitching fabric that was only to be cut out anyway.

I was having a lot of fun at the sewing machine, and the FME ended up covering pretty much the entire piece and basically creating a completely new fabric. I used a matching top thread and a chocolate bobbin thread and set the bobbin tension a little loose so that I got a ‘peek’ of the bobbin thread now and again.

Once I finished with the FME, I fused the piece to felt and added the backing fabric and machine stitched along my trace lines one more time to ensure stability of the fabric edges. I then cut away the extra fabric (leaving a 1/8-inch margin from the stitch line) and blanket stitched all the edges, using 6-ply floss on the outer edges and 3-ply floss everywhere else. By this point I had decided on the coptic stitch binding and cut off the seam allowance.

After I finished the binding, I decided a little more colour was in order, and stippled several colours of metallic setacolour fabric paint as well as some gold mica. I also stippled the 2nd page of the book to tie in the colours a bit better.

Here’s how it looks finished with the 2nd page behind it. Both pages move independently from one another.