Glorious Blue Floral- My everyday Journal Cover

This was my first "real" journal cover, as in, not a prototype. I made it for myself and still use it everyday.

Inspiration came from Alice Makabe's book, Beautiful Botanical Embroidery. The cover shows a tote bag project with a stylized floral pattern that I loved. That was my starting point and I reworked the pattern to fit my 8.75"x16.5" cover area.

If you have a home printer/scanner, that's all you'd need to rework your own pattern. Use the scaling (%+/-) function on the printer to shrink or grow copies of your sketches or a pattern from a book. (Buy Alice's books!) I made individual copies of flowers and played with the arrangement until I was satisfied, filling in with some sketching. Here's where I ended up:

Download my sketch here. It's on two regular printer paper pages. Match it up at the yellow line.

Picking the Fabric

Next, I needed to choose what to stitch on. That was relatively easy, in this case. Years ago I had a sofa that needed to be recovered and I found a fabulous deal on some light grey heavy linen... a lot of it. As you may have guessed, that particular project never quite happened and the sofa 'moved on' from my living room. I still have a LOT of grey linen.

The heavy linen is a good weight for the cover. The outer fabric you choose needs a little heft. BUT, if you fall in love with some quilting cotton, which I frequently do, I simply add a layer behind the cotton. Choose something like a twill or denim or any upholstery weight scrap fabric. You won't ever see it, but it'll give a good base for the pretty top layer and you won't be able to feel the plastic insert through the cover.

For the lining, I couldn't resist using something from Liberty. I found a gorgeous navy colorway of Liberty's historic print "Lodden". Same advice as above-- add a second 'cushion' layer behind the thin cotton OR back it with some medium-weight interfacing.

Get to Stitching

To transfer my pattern I used a combination of methods. I started with my paper pattern and some carbon transfer paper. Once I had traced the bulk of the lines lightly in place I filled in with a heat-erasable Fusion pen.

Picking floss colors is always a long process for me. (So is picking wall paint colors!) Thankfully, there was only ONE color to choose. In this case I knew I was after a dark blue. One of my all-time favorites is DMC924, a deep greyish blue with a strong undertone of green. But after comparison and consideration of my Liberty lining fabric, I went with DMC3750- a fabulous, dark, antique blue with less green in it.

This project takes a LOT of floss. I think I used 6 or 7 skeins. I split the floss and stitched with 2 or 3 threads, depending on the line weight I wanted.

Lesson Learned: Now that I've used my cover for many months, I would make one adjustment and skip the french knots. I'd use small straight stitches instead, or take the time to tack down the french knots with some extra stabilizing stitches. Opening and closing the journal with the elastic closure cord can sometimes pull the french knots which makes them loose and messy.

Assembly

Once all the embroidery was done, putting the Journal Cover together was straightforward for this version of the pattern. Start with a freshly pressed top. You can use the plastic insert to center the embroidery and mark the outline with your heat-erasable pen.

Following the pattern instructions, I split the lining into two pieces and rejoined them with painters tape. I trimmed my edges, using the plastic insert to get the placement right. Next, I made a sandwich of all the layers, right sides together and stitched the whole rectangle closed. Remove the painters tape to open the insertion seam, turn everything right side out, press the edges, and insert the plastic form.

Final Stitches

All that's left is the finishing details. Stitch the insertion seam closed. I used some random fuscia DMC perle cotton to add the anchor points for the binding elastics. This worked well since I planned to add a hot pink closure elastic. While stitching the anchor points, I added some charms! (Love the extra little bling!)

And finally, I added the two internal binding elastics and the pink closure elastic.

TIP: To work with the elastics, find the needle with largest eye in your needle collection! It also helps to put a tiny piece of tape on the end of the elastic to guide it through the eye.