52 Week UFO Challenge Project #2 - Planner cover

Wow - it's already the middle of January!! So I guess I better get working on the cover for my Passion Planner!!

Last week I was the guest blogger on QUILTsocial and during that week I made a lap quilt using Northcott's Colorworks Concepts fabrics. I had a few strips of the flying geese fabric left over and I desperately wanted to use it again for another project.

Northcott flying geese fabric trimmed into strips.

I think my planner cover is the perfect project to use it for!!

Making a book cover 

In September of 2014 I explained how to make a quilted book cover on QUILTsocial, so I'm going to follow the same basic procedure with this one. If you'd like more information you can check out those blog posts here.

Step #1 - pin down the centre strip

I have two strips of the flying geese stripes that already have black borders on them, so I am going to use the "quilt-as-you-go" method to sew these strips and some black and lime green strips onto my base. I'm going to use Fast-2-Fuse because the planner has a soft cover and I want to give it some substance.
I found the center of the base and then drew a vertical line on it with one of my Frixion pens. The first step was to pin down my centre black strip and then one of the lime green ones.

The centre was marked and then 2" away from each side so that I could centre my 4" strip of black fabric.

Step #2 - add fabric strips

The next thing to do was to sew down each of the green strips,then press towards the green strip. I then pinned down one of my flying geese strips (right side down) lining up the edge with the edge of the lime green. It was sewed down then flipped and presses. I kept adding the strips in this manner working from the centre out to the edges.

Step #3 - quilt

Next thing to do was to iron on my backing fabric and then to add some quilting stitches.

Ironing on the backing fabric.

I quilted a series of parallel lines on my cover.

Step #4 - Trim and make inside pockets

The next thing to do, was to trim the cover so that it would fit the planner. I usually say to lay the book out open and measure the width and the length and cut your cover so that there is an extra 1/2" around all sides (so and 1" to your measurements). I explain this in this QUILTsocial post.
The pockets on the inside hold the cover in place. Take your height measurement and cut two pieces of fabric that height by at least 6" wide. I actually cut mine 9" wide so that they were 4 1/2" wide when I pressed them in half. See my QUILTsocial post for more details.

My 9" wide fabric rectangles were folded in half and pressed and then the raw edges were lined up with the edges of the two ends of the cover and pinned in place.

Step #5 - make and apply the binding

I needed two strips of fabric 2 1/2" wide times the width of fabric for the binding on my planned. I sewed the binding to the inside of the cover, all the way around and then folded it to the front and top stitched it in place.

I sewed the binding to the inside of the cover first.

Project #2 is done!!

So...here it is the finished cover. Once the binding was one, I just slipped the front and back covers of the planned into the pockets on my quilted cover and it fit perfectly!! I especially love how the lime green strips of fabric match the lime green page marker that came with the planner. Now my planner has a custom, one-of-a-kind cover!!

The finished cover.

The lime green page marker matches the cover perfectly. The inside pockets hold the cover in place.