Quilted Photo Album Covers

Brrrrr. It's chilly here in Ontario again. After enjoying so many hot days in a row, today feels like fall again. They are even picking fresh asparagus here now. Every thing is at least about 3 weeks early. Hubby had to cut the grass yesterday and that was the first time he's had to cut it in March.

On with the post. Be honest now, how many of you have photo albums that are plain or just down right ugly? I had some. So, I decided to make quilted covers for them. I didn't take before pictures but here are the after ones.

The front cover.

The back cover.

The entire album.

So simple to do. Just sew strips of various colour and sizes together, added squares, rectangles, flowers, etc. on top. Quilt with fancy threads or couched yarn; add buttons, jewels, beads, etc. Make it larger then you need so you can trim it to size later. Fons and Porter had the instructions to make these in one of their magazines and I sort of followed it. I don't see it on their web site but if you Google in a search you will get dozens of sites to visit. They will tell you how to do the final construction but make the covers your own.

Here is another one done the same way but in fall colours.

As you can see, similar but different. The large flowers on this album, and the first one, were silk flowers that I pressed flat, added fusible web (likely Steam-a-Seam Lite) and fused them on, and then did some stitching. Another stash buster project.

This next one was done a little differently.

I had some small pieces of Christmas fabric but not enough to do a large project so I cut them into squares, with alternate green check squares, and sewed them together. It was not quite long enough so I added the red accent stripe and then the patterned fabric and quilted it. If you look closely you can see Christmas trees quilted on the green blocks. Super simple to do.  I gave these all away as gifts.