Friday Night Sew-in & My Bookcover

This year I've decided to join Sugarlane Quilts' Friday Night Sew-in.  Quilter's around the world join together to sew on the third Friday of the month and then share their work on their blogs. Click on the name and find out what everyone else did last Friday.

Here's what I worked on.  It's another UFO.

While I'm designing or sewing I use a 5 subject spiral notebook to jot down my notes and measurements.  I title the page so that all my notes for that object will be together.  That way I can't lose my notes if I just jotted them down on single pieces of paper.  I learned this trick in my other life in an accounting office.  Anyway for all these years my notebook has been naked.  I've always wanted to dress it up but never took the time.  

While going through my UFO's I found this pink and blue arch that I made in another paper piecing class.  This class was held like 14 years ago.  LOL  I never made the finished block just completed the arch.  So again I put two things I wanted to do together and killed two birds as they say.

I started with the arch and picked some fabrics I thought would do nicely.  Here is a picture of how I work when doing unstructured work. 

The white fabric sewing below the strata is the base that everything will be sewn to to get the strata stability and is cut to the size needed to cover my notebook.

The three elements of surface design are: Simplicity; Exaggeration; and Repetition.  So I added more arches in different sized to repeat that element and exaggerate it.  I love checker board piecing so I added some checker board in different sizes and colors.  This meets all three elements of design.  It is also repeated in the checker board green fabric.  Lastly I added more dark blue bias strips to repeat that color. I top stitched everything down to the base to secure it, cut all the jagged edges and then quilted it

Here is the completed book cover piecing after quilting was added:

Here it is with the ends folded over to make it a book cover and binding added to finish it.

Here is what the back looks like after it is on the notebook.

Creating is Fun!!