How To Make A Fabric-Bound Book
Fall is here and along with it colder rainy days – what better time is there to devote lots of time to reading? Some schools have reading lists, libraries have reading challenges, but besides all that, books are a great way to travel and explore new lands and times! Our dolls love to read, so we decided to make them a fabric-bound book that really opens and closes. Now they want a whole bookshelf full! Do your dolls like to read, too? Follow along to make them an easy book or two! Then cuddle up by the fire and read to your hearts content!
Supplies Needed:
•Computer paper
•Paper cutter (optional)
•Scissors
•Ruler and pencil
•Stick glue
•Lightweight cardboard/chipboard
•Small piece of white fabric
•Larger scrap of colored fabric
•Liquid Stitch fabric glue
•Paint brush or q-tips
•Thin ribbons (optional)
•Gold or silver metallic paint or sharpie (optional)
Let's get started!
Step 1: Measure and cut your paper into strips. (Before we began we decided on a 2 3/4 by 2 inch book size, and printed small text boxes on our computer paper. You may not want to go to that much trouble, so blank paper is fine. Use your imagination, or let this be a journal or art book for your doll!) We used 8 strips cut to 8 1/2 by 2 inches for our demonstration book.
Step 2: Fold you paper accordion style every 2 inches. Go back and forth, back and forth, trying to make each fold as even and exact as possible, in relation to the rest of the folds. This will give your book a better appearance once it is done and closed.
As you get to the end of a strip of paper, just overlap a little and glue on another one, using your stick glue and keeping the edges even. Keep adding paper and folding until your book is your desired thickness.
Step 3: Take your scrap of white fabric, and cut it to roughly 3 3/4 by 2 inches. Fold the two shorter sides up and in, adding a little liquid stitch inside to make a top and bottom “hem”. You want this to be exactly as tall as the “spine” of your folded papers.
Squeeze your folded paper together just a bit and add glue to the spine, using a generous amount of Liquid Stitch applied either with the paintbrush or q-tips. Adhere the white fabric to the spine of the folded papers, wrapping the edges around and gluing the free edges to the top and bottom folds of paper. You want really good contact between the fabric and the paper, so apply enough glue to fill in the gaps and almost saturate your fabric.
Let this set for a few minutes.
Step 4: Now we will start on the outer cover of your book. Measure out and cut two pieces of your chipboard or lightweight cardboard to 2 7/8 by 2 1/8 inches. Also cut your scrap of colored fabric to be 7 by 4 3/4 inches.
Now you need to glue the chipboard pieces to the fabric, centered in the middle of the fabric but with a gap between them as thick as the spine of your book, in our case 1/4 of an inch, as in the photo.
Step 5: Trim the fabric extending from the chipboard into angled triangle shapes, as in the photo. Add more Liquid Stitch and wrap these around and glue to the chipboard pieces. If you have any little threads sticking out of the corners you can put a little glue on your finger and wipe it on while smoothing the threads down.
Step 6: Optional - if you want to add bookmarks as in some nicer books and bibles, measure and cut your narrow ribbon into 3-3 1/2 inch lengths. Glue one or more ribbons to the top of the outside of the spine of your paper book, with the long end extending upwards. Later this will fold down into the pages to make a bookmark.
Step 7: Using the Liquid Stitch again, putting glue on the top, bottom, and spine, glue the outer cover of your book around the paper pages. Glue down the spine into the middle first, then wrap around the front, then the back. Make sure it is centered top to bottom, as the cover should stick out just a bit on all sides. Since we used a lot of glue, set this somewhere for half an hour to an hour to dry thoroughly. You might want to weight it down with something so it dries nice and flat. Let it dry all the way before you open the pages up all the way.
Step 7: Optional - if you want the gilded edges that a lot of bibles and good quality leather bound books have, hold the pages together tightly and brush on gold or silver metallic paint. Use a dry brush and do several light coats, rather than one thick one, if you feel like you need more than one coat.
Make sure to loosen the pages from each other after each coat so that your pages do not stick together. You could also use a metallic sharpie and color the outer edges.
Once everything is dried and set, let your doll enjoy her new book!
*A couple of other ways to get text into your book are: You can scan or take photos of the inside of a book, or look on the internet for photos of the inside of a book, size those images to the size of your pages and print them, trim them, and glue them inside your book for a bit of realism. Or you can look in magazines for fine print and cut and glue those in. Or your child or doll could make it a scrapbook or doodle book, adding art or magazine clippings that they like best!
We'd love to see your creations too, so if you make one, please tag us on Instagram @PixieFaire and @forofsuch
You can also share pictures in the Pixie Faire Inspritation Gallery right here on the website, either use the #pixiefaire when posting on IG, or just click the little + box to upload your picture right here on the website!
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We’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment and tell us, What is your favorite book to read?
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--The Pixie Faire Team and @forofsuch
100 Comments
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Janet L. P.
September 13, 2023
I don’t have a favorite book, but I do have a few favorite authors – Tracy Chevalier heads the list. I like historical fiction, and a good mystery . I also try to read a few books every year from the NY Times Best Sellers Llst.