Category: Embroidery

Personalised Notebook Covers

Next week is the last week of the school year here, before the long summer holidays. So I have been making presents for W’s teachers.

I decided upon notebook covers, thinking that they seemed like nice, quick and simple things to make. Nice – yes, they do look nice. Quick – no, they took me about a week. Simple – not at all, the first one was unpicked and redone three times!

Luckily you can’t tell that it was unpicked so many times now it’s finished.

I was following a pattern. The pattern and I did not get on. I stamped my feet and complained a lot that the pattern did not work, and then went back to the beginning and reread to make sure I wasn’t being stupid and missing something obvious. But no, it wasn’t me, and I was never going to end up with the finished cover I wanted by sticking to it, so I ended up abandoning it and trawling the internet looking for different techniques that other people had used.

Finally I same across a tutorial on a blog called Stitch by Stitch, which reading through I could see exactly how it would work, and from then on the job got a whole lot easier!

I pieced the outer cover fabric together to give them the solid red spine. This allowed me to embroider the names onto them where they could be easily read.

They do look very pretty now they are finished, and they’re even finished with a week to spare! W has given his approval, so hopefully his teachers will like them too  🙂