Travel Advent Calendar Sew-along Day 5

Day 5

Today we're going to finish our Travel Advent Calendar!

You have all your pages ready.

Place them together as they will be for the finished book.

Make sure the cardboard is pushed firmly to the end of each page.

Make sure all the pages are evenly lined up and then pin down the spine, close to the cardboard pieces.

Now stitch along your pin line.

I recommend changing your sewing machine needle for this for something like a denim needle that can cope with all the thick layers of fabric.

Take the piece of fabric you cut in the beginning for the book  binding (19 x 7 cm (7 x 3 ").

Fold it in half, wrong sides of the fabric together, length-ways and stitch across the top edge with a 3/8" seam.

Now leave this inside out and slip it over the 'spine' of the book, Mark with a pin, where the 'spine' reaches up to.

Take your 'binding' off the spine again and stitch where you have pinned to form a pocket for the spine of the book.

Before adding the binding to the book, trim the top and bottom edges a little.  This will help the book to sit flat when it is opened out for use.

Now turn your binding piece right sides out and slip the spine of the book into it. Fold in the raw edges and pin.  This is quite a fiddly bit and does take a little patience!

Then finally, stitch the binding onto the spine of the book.

You may also want to use your zipper foot to be able to stitch nice and close to the cardboard pieces inside the book. Again patience is required here as your needle has to go through several layers of fabric. I found I turned the wheel on the side of my sewing machine manually at the start to get the needle going!

And that's it!  You've finished!!!

This year I decided to put some Christmas jokes in each pocket for my girls for the 24 Advent days - For a free printable copy of these 24 jokes, click here. You can then simply cut out the jokes and slip them into the pockets.

If you missed the earlier parts of this sew-along

Day 1 can be found here.
Day 2 can be found here.
Day 3 can be found here.
Day 4 can be found here.

I hope you've enjoyed this advent calendar sew-along.

I'd love to see your version of this if you make one!