Yay it was Friday yesterday, which meant my sewing/stitching pals were busy creating and working on sewing and other craft projects.
In my case my first task was to put together this book cover, which was from Tilda Club issue 36 by Lilabelle Lane Creations. I managed to attach the embroidered panel on Thursday night, and put it all together yesterday (Friday) … however the notebook that it was based on didn’t end up fitting! I grabbed an alternative hard-backed notebook instead, which fits perfectly, but now the embroidered panel is off-centre and kinda annoying. I must say, though, the project itself is really pretty – and it was a great one to use this very colourful and busy Tilda fabric collection.
I’ll be truthfully honest that I found the instructions a bit lacking for this pattern. There seems to be one clear error where it says for both lining pieces “along one of the short ends on each piece…” to fold over and top stitch the edge. On the smaller piece of lining, though, the actual edge that needs the foldover and topstitching is the longer side and not the short one – the instructions contradict the diagram in the instructions.
There’s also no adjustment made to ensure your notebook fits other than for the height (ie it doesn’t take into account the width of the notebook), so the notebook I’d originally intended using for this didn’t fit thanks to the coiled wire spine – I had another hard-backed notebook I could use instead, so that was no drama though. When adding the embroidery panel it states to ‘take into consideration the 1/4″ seam allowance and the width of your A5 notebook’. What would’ve been super duper helpful (especially to this less experienced sewist who takes every instruction literally) is to also add a note to “take into account the 1″ back flap that holds the notebook in place”, and not just the 1/4″ seam allowance. Anyhoo, that’s just my lack of experience not thinking about that, so regardless of which notebook I ended up using the embroidered panel was never going to be aligned in the centre … my bad, and something I’ve learnt from for future projects! One day in the future I’ll do something to fix it – either by removing and reattaching the hexagon panel or adding a stamped fabric tag/label with a positive saying on it. For now I’ll just glare at it with a filthy look every now and then haha.
Last night I also started working on another project – another notebook cover, must be the week for it – but old fluffy bum (aka Smudge) decided she needed attention so it got put to one side. And while trying to finish it this morning she decided to join in the fun but this time kept swishing her tail by the needle, so I had to down tools for a while today too … at some point either today or tomorrow it’ll get finished and another kit can be ticked off the sewing list.
Feather Stitching 