A few people have asked how I’ve made this year’s long strip of daily stitching into a book. If you do an internet search for concertina-style books you will see that it’s quite an easy technique to adapt for cloth.
This is the process I’m using for turning my daily stitching, on a long strip of vintage bed sheet, into a cloth book.
You will need to make some sort of cover for your book, which will consist of a front cover, a spine, and a back cover – this can be all one piece, as mine is, or you can piece fabrics together so that the spine is a different colour. The cover needs to be a tiny bit bigger (a few millimetres, or a quarter of an inch or so) than your stitch journal pages.
To determine the width of the spine, you will need to fold your stitch journal cloth strip, concertina-style, back and forth, into as many pages as you want to have, and then measure the height of your folded stack. The diagram below shows roughly how the construction will work.
The height of the folded stack will tell you how wide the spine of the cover needs to be. The spine of my cover is about an inch wide. The first and last pages will be stitched to the inside front and back covers, the valley folds will be stitched to the spine of the cover, and the mountain folds will form the outer edges of the double-sided pages.
Once your cover is constructed, you can start to stitch your completed pages down. It’s possible to stitch all the pages down right away, but I prefer to wait until they’re finished because once they’re attached to the spine, you won’t be able to get at them so easily.
You can mark the inside of the spine, dividing it into six (this is the number of times you will attach a valley fold) so that you have guidelines for where to stitch the page down. You will basically be sewing every other page to the cover. A running stitch is fine, but you could also backstitch.
I use perle 12 cotton thread for stitching the pages to the spine, but any good strong sewing thread would be fine. Here’s the process in action:
Hope this helps.
I’m so grateful for this Karen. I have my beautiful blue linen that finally arrived so I can do the 100 day challenge (even if just on my blog since I’ve left Insta) & I’ve been tossing around creating a fabric book. This is a sign!
Thank you,
Em ð“…ª
(new identity, old me)
Lovely! Enjoy your blue linen 💙 and the 100-day project.
Thank you! It’s washed and ready to be cut!
It does look good, doesn’t it, but I can’t imagine trying to stitch with the book made!
you’d have to be pretty dextrous. Or a contortionist 🙂