Golden Cover {Sewing}

Last week, I mentioned that I was all set to make a fabric cover for Baby MiH's red book - the UK health booklet. However even if I had all the materials, there was one key piece missing, the construction of the cover. I was not sure how I was going to go about it - would I take out the actual red cover? would I need some transparent plastic cover for the inside? My usual response is to leave until some genius idea (usually from someone else) comes along. And it always does - at some point. 

I stumbled across the Bloom journal cover tutorial and loved the construction - all I needed to do was to change all the measurements, discard the scrappy embellishment but keep the basics to make it my own. And ta dah - a deluxe red book cover! 

I cannot tell you how happy I am with the result. For once it actually looks like what I had in my head - probably because I made some trial versions of bits of the cover beforehand - a first!

Not sure there is a lot to note - the tutorial is brilliantly written even though it took me a while to get my head around the last step. I had issues with measurements, so make sure you do your maths correctly - to be honest there may be a simpler way to present the measurements so that it can be more easily adapted, but she did not make the tutorial for the red book. 

The result looks super neat with the inside fabric - and a bit sturdier to keep the red book in my bag. It also looks great from the side. 

I also discovered the blanket stitch on my machine - it is awesome. I am really crap at doing this stitch, it is never neat, always with different sizes, and I find with appliqué that it is harder to go through the fabric (oh yes the cross is appliqué - check me out!). But the machine, well there is no stopping it, is there! I did add some gold hand stitching to make it fancy, and mirror the main fabric.   

So what did I use?

- Golden garden fabric by Alexander Henry found at Plush Addict
- Red Kona, can be found at Simply Solids
- The inside fabric is part of the giveaway I won at Plum and June (sponsored by Skye Reeve)
- DMC golden metallic thread (I used 2 strands)
- you will also need some lightweight fusible interfacing, found at Seamstar 

My bag looks much better... so what can I cover next? I am on a roll! 

Joining other finishes at TGIFF hosted by Textile Diva this week and Crazy Mom quilts.