DIY Fabric Covered Mini Notebook Tutorial |

Share this on:

I love these Liberty covered notebooks I saw on the Alice Caroline blog but it was just too costly to ship a notebook all the way from the UK. Today’s post is a tutorial on how to make your own DIY fabric covered mini notebook. I decided to make my version smaller because I want to carry it around to jot down notes. Of course I used my Liberty scraps for this to get a bigger variety of prints in the notebook cover. You can also check out my other fabric scrap projects here.

Mad For Fabric - DIY Fabric Covered Mini Notebook — Mad For Fabric – DIY Fabric Covered Mini Notebook

Materials

Cereal Box or Cardboard
Paper
Scissors or Paper Cutter
Modge Podge or Elmer’s Glue
Binder Clips or Rubber Bands
Fabric Scraps
Muslin
Scotch Glue Stick
Sewing Machine
Thread

Instructions

1. To make the notebook paper, take 12 sheets of 8.5″x11″ printer paper and evenly cut them into 4 pieces each using scissors or a paper cutter. Stack all the cut sheets so the edges are even and then use binder clips or rubber bands to hold the paper in place. The binder clips might leave indentations in the paper so put something in between the paper and the binder clips. Use Modge Podge or Elmer’s glue along the edge of the paper to glue all the papers together. Wait 2-3 hours for the Modge Podge to dry. Reapply a second coat if necessary.

2. Cut the front and back covers for the notebook out of a cereal box or cardboard. Measure the binding of the paper you glued and cut a cereal box strip for the notebook binding. Mine measure 1/4″.

3. For the fabric cover, cut a piece of muslin a little bigger then the width of the entire notebook. Then use Scotch glue stick to adhere the scraps to the muslin. Use a zigzag stitch on your sewing machine to go over all of the raw edges of the fabric.

4. Trim the muslin to the width of the front, back, and binding of the cereal box pieces and add 1/2″ allowance on each side. Mark 1/2″ lines on each side using a black pen and then use that as a guide to glue the cereal box covers to the binding. Make sure to remember to glue the strip for the binding. Use Modge Podge along the edges of the fabric and fold the edges on each side over the cereal box covers.

Mad For Fabric - Notebook Cover With Fabric — Back of Muslin with 1/2″ marked on each side ( left )
Cereal Covers Adhered to Back of Muslin with Glue Stick ( right )

5. To cover the raw edges of the fabric showing on the cereal box covers, cut a piece of scrapbooking paper the width of the front and back covers and fold in half.

6. Glue one side of the scrapbooking paper to the cereal box cover and the other to the first ( or last page depending which side you are gluing ) of the white notebook page. The end result looks like this.