Take Note

I had so much fun making these! My roomie, Vikki, always keeps a journal. She commented to me a couple months before Christmas that she was very disappointed with her current journal: it's cover art was not pretty enough for Vikki, or inspirational in any way. Good cover art on a journal is VERY important. So, for Christmas I made Vikki a new journal cover that she can take off and put on whatever journals she wants. Then I decided it was so pretty and fun to make that I would make one for my mom as well. And my sister, although, I didn't manage to get a picture of hers, somehow.

My inspiration for these came from a book I requested for my birthday. My birthday was in August, but my parents sent me a number of very exciting sewing-related books as a very belated birthday gift in November. The book is called Doodle Stitching and I am in LOVE with it. I really really enjoy doing hand embroidery. It's tough because I can't make and sell clothes with hand embroidered designs and details because so many hours have to go into the work, which makes the items too expensive to sell. So, I now reserve all my hand embroidery for the people I love most.

This is a super easy project if you want to get into hand embroidery. Just go online or grab a book that shows you how to do some basic embroidery stitches (the book I mentioned above would work, however, I learned--and as an adult, I might add--from this awesome Kids Klutz book). Then draw out some basic doodles on a piece of fabric (cotton works best, and if you put it in an embroidery hoop, that also helps to keep it stretched out and flat while sewing) and go to town embroidering over your doodles! That's what I did for these journal covers; however, I used linen to embroider onto, mainly because I liked the look of the fabric and because I happen to have about 3 metres of it lying around.

After hand stitching my designs, I ironed the edges of the linen under, so that there wouldn't be any frayed edges showing, and machine sewed it to the fabric that I used to cover the journal (but you could do this by hand). Or, if you don't want to make the journal cover part, you could just glue your beautiful bit of embroidery onto a journal of your choice. Voila!