Reversible Cover for my Idea Journal

Sometimes at night when I am trying to fall asleep, my body is tired but my mind has no intention of slowing down. These are the times when crafty thoughts keep me awake. Many, many times I've jumped out of bed to jot down an idea, make a note of something to look up the next day, or sketch out a pattern, embellishment, quilt idea, etc, etc...


I keep track of my crafty thoughts in a spiral bound journal that my grandmother gave me. It was a cute journal but I decided to make it a little more spiffy by making a cover out of some my favorite fabric. I found a great reversible journal tutorial from Lara Cameron at Kirin Notebook

The main fabric I wanted to use was some Amy Butler Belle fabric. I love the turquoise pods on black. My cousin gave me a fat quarter of a tonal turquoise batik that I used for the pockets. The retro flowers on a brown background made a perfect combination for my journal.

The cover was easy to make thanks to the great tutorial but I did run into a couple of problems.
The tutorial uses metric measurements...this shouldn't be a problem, right? I am an engineer and convert units on a regular basis. But maybe my calcs were off. So I think I may have been off in my measurements. After I had sewn all the pieces together I was a little disappointed when I slipped the cover on a realized that it was too tight---and my journal wouldn't close!

So....instead of ripping out the seams and making adjustments to the cover, I decided to make the adjustments to the journal itself. I shaved off a little bit from edges of the front and back card board covers. When it still didn't fit, I removed the wire spiral and used little pieces of string to bind the pages together. After these little tweaks, the journal slipped in beautifully and I love it! The journal was over half way full before I got around to covering it but I am so glad that I finally did!