https://www.cutoutandkeep.net/projects/steampunk-journal-3 • Posted by FrolleinKram
I'm planning on a whole steampunk outfit ( actually, on two o.O ) and this is just one more accessoire for it. Yays! Basically, this is a leather covered book with a leather strip that goes around twice to close it.
I'm planning on a whole steampunk outfit ( actually, on two o.O ) and this is just one more accessoire for it. Yays! Basically, this is a leather covered book with a leather strip that goes around twice to close it.
Grabb your notebook and get a piece of leather that will fit around. Mine was a little bit too small, but I wanted two colours anyway, so who on earth cares? Excuse todays super crappy pictures. x) You know how to line a book, don't ya? So, decide which side you want to face out and just hotglue the leather on the backside ( !!! and ONLY there to begin with! ), flap in flapps, glue, the usual. When you glue the flaps, be really sure to pull tight so the leather won't have any folds, wrinkles or space between it and the original book cover. Excuse todays crappy english too, please. >____<
Now it's time to decide how you wanna close the book. It you want a strap like me, decide where it's supposed to start and where to end, make little dots to remember the place, measure and cut a strip of leather. NOTE: If you wanna close it some other way, you might have to do this -before- hotglueing the backside. *** Sewing leather is a pain in the ass! Anyways, sew the strip and one button to the spot you marked before. The button is - of course - for decoration AND to support the stitched leather, cause mine is pretty thin and I don't know it I can trust it on its own. Make a fist, lift up your thumb and... aaah, forget about it.
Now, I was pretty unsure how to make the strip open and close, I thought about sew-on-pushbuttons, but we had none at home, so I decided I'd use a hook and eye. Sew the eye to where the strap will end. Again, pain in the ass. Defeat the pain!!! >________< As soon as everything that needed to be sewed on -is- sewed on ( further decoration items, gears, clockwork parts, whatever ), you can add the other piece of leather:
Dah-daaaaaaah! Line up, glue on, flap flapps etc. You could also sew the pieces together, I saw that somewhere on here and it was be-e-autifull, but... the pain in the ass?!?! Luckily, the part of dark leather was a natural edge-y part anyways, so it looks pretty cool.
Get the end of the strap, decide VERY CAREFULLY where the hook is supposed to be and sew. Hook, strip, button, button facing up. See? Almost finished.
See if the book closes nicely, be proud of yourself and stuff like that, blablabla. If you wanna leave it that way, congrats, you're officially done ( uh, maybe not, check out the last point in the last step! ). If not, and if the leather does not close nicely on the corners and you don't like that, you can easily get rid of that: Sew book corners!
To do that, take a small rectangular piece of fabric - I used felt - fold it in half ( sould be an almost perfect square now, plus of course a little bit of seam allowance ) and sew one side close, snip off seam allowance, turn outside in and hotglue over the edges with the seam facing in. Is that awesome or WHAT? The very, very last thing is to cut a piece of paper according to the colour of the very first page of the book and glue it on the backside of the front, just to cover the leather glueing mess. DAHDDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!