Altered Notebook Tutorial

After having bought Mod Podge to do an image transfer, I gave some thought about what other sort of project I could do to use up some more of it, and decided to try my hand at altering a dollar store notebook.

I am in love with how it turned out so much that I'm going to cover my address book in the same way.  

I'm going to give this one to my mother on Mother's Day.

Here's a tutorial 

I started out by painting the cover white because it was red and showed through the light coloured fabric. 

Cut your fabric about an inch bigger than your book.

 Brush a generous amount of Mod Podge on the covers and press your fabric down taut.

 Clip triangles into the fabric on either side of the spine like so.

 Apply Mod Podge to the fabric tab, and tuck it under the pages using something stabby.

 Cut a notch into each corner and glue the excess fabric down.

 Like this.

 Glue down your trims with a generous amount of Mod Podge.  At this point, lay down plastic wrap between your cover and the lead page of your book.

 Fold over the excess trims and glue them down with more Mod Podge.

Poke a ribbon saturated with Mod Podge into the spine with a stabby thing if you want a bookmark.  If you want to add jute twine flowers, there is a link to a tutorial here.

Place plastic wrap over the cover and stuff the book between some heavy items.


When dry, glue cardstock inside the cover to hide the overlapped fabric and trims.

I decided to camouflage the messy look of the inside cover cardstock using burlap.

The easiest way to apply burlap is to brush a coat of Mod Podge onto your inside cover, place the burlap on top, then cover the burlap with plastic wrap and press into place, pulling it taught as you go. 

To begin the application, I only cut the top edge and the left side edge of burlap and trimmed off the other two sides only after I had stretched and glued it down because it's hard to determine the exact size the burlap should be beforehand.
 

Trim off the bottom and right hand side excess after the Mod Podge sets a few minutes and the burlap begins to stick well.

This effectively hid the bumpy inner cover cardstock.


I said Mod Podge a lot in this entry.