My 2015 Emily Ley Simplified Planner died a horrible death back in September when my toddler pulled the front and back covers in different directions and destroyed the spiral binding. For 2016, I purchased Elise Blaha's Get To Work Book and when I saw this Quilted Planner Cover tutorial from Sew Fearless, I knew I had to adapt it to fit my new planner.
Figuring out how to adapt Sew Fearless's tutorial so that the cover would fit my planner was the trickiest part.
For the width of my cover (laid out flat), I used the width of the planner pages x 2 + the thickness of the planner + 1 inch.
For the height of my planner cover, I used the height of the planner pages + 1 inch.
I'm usually not the sort of quilter who uses scraps for my project but I had a lot of large scraps from the Lizzy House Cat Nap line of fabric so I decided to experiment with some improv piecing.
This part came out just okay in my opinion. I didn't really enjoy it. Evenly sized geometric shapes are my jam.
I pieced together my scraps so that they measured 18.5 inches wide by 10 inches high.
I sandwiched my pieced fabric around a large scrap of Annie's Soft and Stable, basted around the edges, and quilted lots of straight, vertical lines. I started with one line down the middle and then made a few widely spaced lines and then went back and filled in with lots more narrowly spaced lines so that I wouldn't end up with any lumps.
Next I created the sleeves following Sew Fearless's tutorial (but adjusting the height for my planner). I used Pellon SF101 interfacing (which is the only thing I didn't have enough scraps of on hand for this project).
This part definitely reminded me of making book covers out of paper grocery bags for my text books back in elementary school.
I decided not to add any pockets as I never use planner pockets anyway. I prefer to paperclip any thing I need on a certain date to the appropriate page so I don't forget about it.
Lastly, I made some scrappy binding and covered all of the edges. For this part, I made double fold straight grain binding (this is my favorite binding making tutorial) and machine stitched both sides following this machine binding tutorial.
Happy planning!