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How to Embroider Your Own Book Covers for Back-to-School

comments (1) September 13th, 2008     

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JenniferStern Jennifer Stern, contributor
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These adorable book covers are fun to embroider and require just two quick trips through the serger to put together!
Trace around your book.
Add an allowance for the flap on each end.
These adorable book covers are fun to embroider and require just two quick trips through the serger to put together!

These adorable book covers are fun to embroider and require just two quick trips through the serger to put together!

Photo: jen stern
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When I was in school, we would cut up brown paper bags to make book covers, but now they have these cool ones made out of knit fabric that just stretch around the cover. I wish I had realized how easy they were to make—before Anna and I spent the day running around looking for some that would fit her books and her selective sense of style! This is a great project to add a little embroidery to, so let me show you a cool technique for embroidering on knits when you know the fabric will be permanently stretched after the project is complete.

This fabric cover is cut a little less wide than the book cover; it will have to stretch to fit. If you embroider on the fabric and then try to stretch it, the embroidery might be distorted, or worse, the fabric might pucker...yuck! We are going to stretch the fabric BEFORE we embroider, so it will look great once it's covering the book!

Here's what you'll need:

  • A book to cover
  • A big enough piece of stretch fabric to cover the book
  • Embroidery designs of your choice
  • Embroidery threads
  • Soft tear-away stabilizer
  • 505 temporary adhesive spray
  • All-purpose thread

I started out trying to come up with a simple math problem to help you calculate how big to cut out your fabric—it was quickly becoming more complicated than it needed to be. So, I decided to simply trace the book I wanted to cover and make some adjustments when I added fabric for the flaps and that worked out great! Depending on how stretchy your fabric is, you may want to add even less fabric when we get to that step.


 Trace around the book while it's lying open and flat against your fabric.

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Comments (1)

Cyndiella writes: These are very cute. I have made many book covers out of those brown paper bags through the years. The knit fabric is such a good idea for making these. You could even use an old t-shirt. The embroidery is a fun idea also with lots of possibilities, because of course you have to decorate it. Thanks for sharing.
Posted: 9:06 am on September 29th
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