How to make a fabric book cover - Part 2

If you haven't been following this series of tutorials, or even if you have you can find Part 1 here and Part 3 


Part 2 - Making the Inside Pockets

In this part I'm going to teach you how to make the inside pockets.

For a simple pocket you need one piece of fabric that is twice the width of the pocket you are going to make to hold it to the book. If you are just making a book cover make it about half the width of the book. If you want to cover the inside of the book you can make it almost as wide as the cover. It is up to you as long as it is wider than half, I find that holds best.

Now here comes the fun part. How to make business card pockets for your journal.

I'm no expert I kinda made this up as I went but I enjoyed it a lot.

 Now the way the inside pockets work is they are a folded piece with the fold on the inside and the exposed edges get caught in the edges when it is sewn up.

You need a piece of fabric wider than your business card and quite long and a business card to measure from.

As you can see here by the pictures you just fold the fabric over creating a pocket using the card as a measurement. Iron the fabric down after each fold to hold it in position.

Now here is where I made a mistake when I sewed it up. It is really important to sew it so that the seams just run either side of the card with not much gap. I left too much of a gap and the cards slide out because it's too loose.

Because I folded down the fabric so much for the card slots I needed to add some more to make it long enough and then I added more on the left and right to turn it into a pocket. The pink fabric is folded over and goes all the way to the end of the purple. This creates the first pocket. If you want to business cards to be on the front you need to make sure the fold it to the right of the cards like it is here.

I added a decorative stitch down the edge of the pink to make it look pretty.

 As you can see here I made two pockets for the front and one for the back.

Now here is where I made a mistake with laying them out. Do you know how I mentioned in the first post how I didn't cut my template with the edge on it? Well here is where that became a problem. because I didn't measure these flaps properly against the template I found when I sewed it up (I'll tell you how next post) I didn't catch all the flaps the whole way around.

Place your front fabric down and lay the flaps on top with the folds in the centre. Make sure that your business card slot is face down on the front fabric. That way when it's turned around it will be visible.

If you've cut your template right just make sure the flaps are the right size and cut them to match the size of your template. If you've been good like I haven't sewing them all together will be super easy because everything will have been cut to size.


Look out for Part 3 - Sewing up the journal cover which will be coming very soon. I'm not going to have a month between posting this time. I'm writing the next post right now :D

Happy Stitching,
Caitlin