Recipe Book Makeover

I have several notebooks and recipe organizers and most of them are not very pretty. After seeing some books on japanese quilting with all those beautiful patchwork covers for books, I decided that I would try to make my own pattern for one of my smaller recipe books. I decided on this pink plaid from my vintage and almost vintage stash (affectionally called "The Fabric Waaaaaallll") for the cover, plain muslin, and a pink/white/green/dark pink print with flowers, leaves and strawberries for the patchwork, and a pink ticking for the binding. It has some polyester in it, and I wish it was all cotton, but it looked good, so I forgave it. After alot of measuring, re-measuring, sewing, quilting, piecing, ripping out and taking it off and on the book, I ended up with what you see here. I put a pocket on the inside front for wayward magazine cutouts and lists.

That's it for

the sewing part… the inside part around the binder thingy was old and ugly (this book is from the 80's but it never has had the pleasure of being useful til now). I looked in my flat box of decorative papers and found a pink and white piece that I liked. Using a piece of copy paper I made a pattern to use so I could cut the paper to match, have it tuck in a little and not have to have a big seam anywhere. Thankfully, that worked and I glued it in place. A little bit of the old book cover shows at the top and bottom and rather than try and cover that up, since it looked good, I chose the fabrics that would coordinate with it. So much prettier than it was, and soft!

This pink book will be for desserts so I will have them in one place, and I'll be making my own dividers and cards which I'll share later.

A red one next, I think.