A Tale of Two… Book Sleeves
I made these two fun loving book sleeves for a book lover friend.
The Nice One
The first one was a delight to sew. I've done little (or maybe no) raw edge applique. It was a lot of fun choosing fabric, cutting little squares and petals, and then fusing it all together and finishing the edges.
I have been admiring orange peel quilts like the two below from Rachel Hauser and Amy Smart for quite a while now. But I haven't made my own yet, so this book sleeve was a great way to get my toes wet with orange peels.
Orange Peel Envy:
Overall this first book was fun and such a delight to sew. The second one has a different story.
The Mean One
Book sleeve number two was very... undelightful.
Happy Days
When I began designing the second book sleeve I was picturing a bright, playful, and modern vibe. Eventually I found The Peanut Butter Quilt by Then Came June. The cover quilt for the pattern had exactly the feel I was looking for, and the whole pattern is free! So the journey began.
I picked up two fat quarters at my local quilt shop and filled in the rest with bright solids from my stash. The free Peanut Butter Quilt pattern got mixed up with a little dose of quilt math and soon I had a nice small scale version of the original pattern. Then it was time to cut fabric, and I still had a nice smile.
Terrible Piecing
The trouble began at the sewing machine. Apparently, I had not yet learned how to accurately piece smaller patterns. Every time I opened up my seams after sewing the seams were just a little off. EVERY single seam was off. None of them lined up! I didn't understand how I couldn't even get lucky and have just one set of seams match. Normally I'm okay with a couple of seams that aren't lined up, but this was ridiculous!
About 75% through piecing the sleeve I did some research and discovered this article about accurate piecing by Suzy Quilts. And in that article I discovered this magical thing called the fork pin. I didn't run out and buy some, but the principle solved all of my quilty woes! Well, it did for about 15 minutes, until I encountered the next hair pulling problem.
When we are sewing along the top fabric almost always shifts a little bit. But when you put a pin on either side of every seam, and you sew over the pin, the fabric can't shift at all. My last row of piecing had excellently matched seams!
Horrible Basting
Okay, I was on to basting. The smart thing would have been pin basting, especially for such a small project. But, being me, I thought it was a smart time to try out a homemade spray baste recipe I had seen online. Bad decision. The spray baste was okay, but my spray bottle was horrible. By the time it had dried I had sections with no glue at all and then some sections with hard clumps of dried flour and water. As you can imagine, "flat", "smooth", or "unwrinkled" were not the correct words to describe it.
No Good Quilting
I wanted the piecing to stand out so I could maintain minimalist mordern vibes. Naturally, I chose to quilt in the ditch. Which, it turns out, is very hard to do when none of the ditches ever line up. So now the "invisible" quilting is very visible in random places throughout the sleeve.
Very Bad Assembly
Nothing went right on this project. I thought that the actual assembly would be easy since I had already made the first sleeve with the exact same dimensions. Wrong again. I didn't have enough quilt sandwich to cut two pieces from so I had to do some questionable quilt math and change my pattern to accomodate one piece of fabric that wraps around both sides of the sleeve. The grand finish of this make involved a serger with bad tension and an exhausted and apathetic quilter. To be honest I'm a little happy to be gifting this sleeve so that it is hopefully out of sight, out of mind.
Project Overview - The Nice One
Pattern: My own
Finished Date: 7/20/23
Cost: $0
Fabric: stash
Time: 6 hours
Project Overview - The Mean One
Pattern: My own + Peanut Butter Quilt Pattern by TCJ
Finished Date: 8/10/23
Cost: $5.50
Fabric: Kona Cotton, stash
7 hours
