Fairy Tale Book

This summer the gals in my family had a fabric swap. This is the scrap my sister mailed to us, and we all had to purchase fabric that complimented it.

Here is the color pallet we ended up with...

Also, my sister made a quilt out of some fairy tale fabric, and she gave me the scraps.

Like I said, my daughter already has too many blankets, so I decided to make a fairy tale book out of all my new fabric.

the cover

This is the inside cover and page one.

I started by sewing a border of yellow fabric (1 inch) around each of the fairy tale blocks.

Then I sewed a 2.5 inch border around each block on three sides.

Actually, I was planning on sewing the 2.5 border around all 4 sides of the blocks, but I had only cut enough to cover 3 sides.

Ugg. I hate backtracking when I am doing a project.

But then I realized that I like the asymmetrical look. And I liked the rectangular look better than a square one.

So I guess laziness led me to the final design.

And I like it.

The fun part came after the blocks were complete.

I made a mock book out of scraps of paper to help engineer the book. It served as a guide to indicate which block would be sewn to which block.

Each "page" is sewn to another page by its side and to its back. So eventually I had 5 page sets. Each page set has 4 fairytale blocks (front to back).

Yikes.

It's not as complicated as it sounds, as long as you follow your scrap-paper-mock-guide.

Each page has a layer of cotton batting between the fabric and is machine quilted. I didn't quilt over the fairytale picture though. I left that bordered instead.

The raw edge was only about 3 inches long. I then folded in those edges and sewed the whole page around the edge as a border. It hid the raw edge nicely.

My sewing machine and needle are not sturdy enough to just sew squack down the middle of 5 layers, so I pondered on how to bind the pages together.

After a day or sew so of thinking, I realized I only needed to sew one page set to one page set . Then sew another page to another page. Soon all the page sets were sewn to one another.

There are no words in the book. I will leave that to her imagination.