DIY Liberty Fabric Book Tutorial – Part 3

Today is the last post in the 3 part tutorial series on how to make this DIY Liberty fabric book. If you missed part 1 and 2, you can find them here and here. Thanks to Ava & Neve Liberte Courtiers for providing the beautiful Liberty lawn fabrics used in this book.

Today’s post will cover how to bind the pages of the book and attach the binding strip. I thought about using grommets and then using embroidery floss or thicker thread to connect the pages together but I didn’t have enough space of the left side of my pages. If you decide to go this route then add about 1.5″ extra on the left side to make spaec for the grommets.

Here is a recap of the materials.

Materials

• Liberty Art Fabrics – Sponsored by Ava & Neve
• Solid Quilting Cotton – Only the tan and white colors are purchased by me. All the other solid colors are Liberty lawn provided by Ava & Neve.
• Glue Stick
• Basting Glue – I used Aleene’s No Sew Fabric Glue. This is great because it washes out with water.
• Scissors or Rotary Cutter
• Interfacing – I used Pellon Craft-Fuse 808. This will make the pages stiffer.
• Sewing Machine – Alternatively you can hand sew all of the fabrics together.
• Thread
• Hand Sewing Needle
• Paper
• Iron
• Ruler
• Cutting Mat
• Pen – A normal pen will work but I used a FriXion pen so I could mark my fabric and then iron to make the ink disappear.

Instructions

1. Place the back side of the cover and the the front of the first page side by side. Try not to leave any gap. Use a wide zigzag stitch to connect the 2 pages. Do this for the remaining pages 2 and 3 and 4 and 5. Make sure the back of the previous page is on your left and the front of next page is on your right when you are doing the zigzag stitch. This is what the zigzag stitches will look like when the book is open.

2. When you’re done you should have 3 sets of pages connected with zigzag stitches. Now comes the fun part of hand sewing these 3 sets of pages together. I started by connecting pages 2-3 to pages 4-5. Use a matching thread color and hand sew them together. See how my stitches are joining just the bottom of page 3 and the top of page 4 together.

3. When you are done connecting these 2 sets, hand sew the cover/page 1 set together. This is the end result of the 3 sets of pages hand sewn together.

The inside of the book where the pages were hand stitched looks like this. Since the thread is a matching color it’s hard to tell my hand stitching are not evenly spaced =)

4. To make the binding strip, I used leftover fabric from the heart template and sewed them together. My strips were cut 1.25″ wide but you can adjust the size  according to how much fabric prints you want to use. Just make sure the length will cover the spine of your book excluding seam allowances. I added a piece of tan quilting cotton so I could have a solid border on the spine to match my book cover. With right sides facing, sew the top and bottom seam together ( noted with blue boxes ) so you have a tube.

From top to bottom, the fabrics I used were Betsy S, Pinky, Ciara A, and Mitsi B. Aren’t these beautiful?

5. Now measure the tan strip and mark it in half using a fabric pen ( left ). Cut on the line you just drew and make sure you don’t cut the bottom fabric since your fabric is a tube. You end up with a piece of tan fabric evenly divided between the top and bottom ( right ).

6. Measure the thickness of your book and add 1″ and seam allowance so you can fully cover the spine the book. If it ends up too wide you can always stitch it in later. Mine was about 1″ thick so I cut 2 strips 2.5″ wide assuming .25″ seam allowance. Ignore the fact my tan quilting cotton is longer. I trimmed it later on but didn’t take a picture. Sew both fabrics right sides together leaving a gap at the bottom. You can slip stitch the gap closed or if you’re lazy like me you can use fabric glue.

7. Dot fabric glue or use glue stick along the front and back of the book and then attach the binding strip. The one thing I didn’t account for was the bulk in the corners of the pages so it pushed up the binding a bit on the top and bottom of the book. You may want to make your binding strip wider and then sew it narrower afterwards.

8. To make sure the binding was attached, I sewed along the edges of the binding strip on the front and back. The stitching will show on the back of the front cover and the back page so just keep that in mind. My last page was not blank so the stitching ended up running through one of the Liberty fabrics I had on the page. One way to adjust for this is to leave about a 1″ margin on the left side of the cover and all the pages.

Thanks for following along in this tutorial series and happy “mad” Liberty bookmaking!

Related posts:

DIY Liberty Fabric Book Tutorial – Part 1 DIY Liberty Fabric Book Tutorial – Part 2 Mixed Media Fabric Scrap Art Tutorial DIY Fabric Covered Mini Notebook Tutorial