How To Sew A Book Cover

Books are great presents for those who love reading. Nowadays electronic readers are especially popular. However, a beautiful cover is also a necessary and important item for them. You can make it with your own hands.

You’ll need:

• scissors;
• zig – zag scissors;
• pins;
• fabric (we used two kinds of fabric, they both are cotton);
• vliseline (we used H630 vliseline);
• a ribbon (to create a bookmark).

How to draw a sample of the cover:

We’ll need 2 rectangles. Their wideness and height will depend on the size of your notepad. The height of the rectangles is calculated the following way: you take the height of your notepad + 0.5 cm for the cover to be not too tight once it is put on (if you strengthen the cloth with vliseline, it should be not less than 1 cm) plus 1 cm allowance for the joints on both sides.

The wideness of the rectangles includes the whole wideness of the notepad (the notepad should be open when you calculate it or you may take the wideness twice + the wideness of its spine) + the wideness of the lapel (it may be different, in our case, it was equal to 5 cm) + 0.5-1 cm for the cover not to be too tight once it’s put on and 1 cm allowance on both sides for the joints.

We strengthen the cover’s cloth with vliseline:

By the way, if you do not want the lapels to be rotund – like, we recommend you not strengthening the whole area of the cloth with vliseline. Do it only as much as the wideness of the notepad is.

Vliseline H630 looks like a thin polyester batting one side of that is covered with a glue substance. When you heat it with the help of an iron, the glue melts and it gets glued to the cloth. Only 3-5 minutes are enough for the fabric and vliseline to connect with each other well. Actually, this vliseline is very good for strengthening the fabric used for making bags.

We fold the rectangles inside with their face sides to each other and fasten the sides with pins:

You need to link the sides of the cover:

We cut off the allowances with the help of zig – zag scissors and iron the article:

Now, the most interesting and at the same time complicated in a way part begins! The main thing here is not to get in a mess – we’ll try to describe the whole process of creating lapels of the cover in details.

We turn out the rectangles so that their wrong side is inside. We fold the sides (the ones that we have linked with each other). The size of the folding should be equal to the wideness of the lapels on both sides. In our case, 1 lapel was equal to 5 cm. We iron the bending areas.

We unbend the lapel on the face side of the cover and fasten it with pins. While doing it, we don’t catch the inner (lining) cloth:

We unbend the lining cloth to the left:

We turn out the cover so that its face side is inside:

We do the same with the rest of the edges. Here is what we should get:

We stitch the ribbon that serves as a bookmark to the article. In order to do it we need to cut off a ribbon of any length and fasten it with pins strictly in the center of the cover, in between the face and the lining fabrics.

We link the upper and lower parts of the cover. Keep in mind that we should leave a hole of 3-4 cm on the lower part so that to be able to turn the article out on the wrong side:

With the help of zig – zag scissors, we cut off the allowances and cut off the edges aslant with the help of ordinary scissors.

We turn the cover out through the hole, iron it. Then, we sew up the hole with the help of a blind stitch or you may glue it with the help of a textile glue. Our cover is ready!