Baby's Birthday Book

Carrying on from my previous post detailing the fabric printing process of Baby's Book, the latest Labor of Love continues....

In my usual "How I Make Things" fashion, I wandered down an unknown path, with vague images of what the path might hold, and an even vaguer image of where I might end up.   I had a bunch of nursery rhyme and fairy tale images printed up after adding a few words to each page, using a photo editor.  Somehow I ended up not taking any pictures of this stage, so a shot of the iron and a couple of partial pages will have to do:

I thought through several options of finishing the page edges, and decided to use the cute little mousey and clothes-on-the-line fabrics as backing for each page.    I simply sewed each printed page onto a backing page, RS together, leaving an opening to turn them WS together.  After turning them I sewed around the edges with a decorative stitch.

In order to keep the fabric pages from slipping around, I also did a little bit of quilting around the main images (in beige thread, so you may have to biggify to see it):

On the front and back covers, I added some cotton batting in between the pages, giving the covers a bit more oomph:

Inside Back Cover
The words are a few nursery rhymes that I typed up, all run together,
followed by the story of "The Owl and the Pussycat" -
one of my all time faves :)

Back Cover

Once I had the individual pages all done, the biggest problem was how to bind them all together!  I considered holes and ties, but I didn't want to use any metal, and embroidered holes just weren't going to cut it for me.  I ended up sewing a strip of twill tape to the edge of each page:

I thought I could just sew the outer edge of the twill tape together, but wouldn't you know it, even though the layers of tape were easy to sew, the book itself was too thick to fit underneath the screw on the side of the machine!   Any machine I had, vintage or modern.   Hand stitching seemed to be the only option, so I did a blanket stitch, using a strong thread.

The last step was finishing off the ends of the twill tape.  I cut them level with the book pages, except for the front and back pieces of twill.  I folded these over each other, covering the (fray checked) edges of the other twill tape ends, and hand sewed them down.

The finished book:

I'll (hopefully) have some pics of baby enjoying the book asap  :)  It was definitely a success with the adults ;-)