Thanks to Spoonflower, I was able to create a personalized fabric book for my little guy. He really loves the few fabric books that he has, since they are fun to touch and make crinkly noises. But, I realized that a lot of his book deal with representations of things he won't see in real life for a while (I love sea creatures, but what baby comes across an octopus or starfish everyday? haha). So, I decided to make one for him with images that are more personal.

The book started out as a very large image meant to fit a cotton fat quarter. Spoonflower recommends 150px per square inch and a fat quarter is 18" x 22". This meant my image was 2700px by 3300px.


I took of 1/2" worth of pixels around the edge and divided the remaining space into my pages. There are 12 rectangles for 10 pages and the cover. I added different background images and did collages of everyday things on top. I used The Gimp to make my large image.

My fat quarter

I ended up ordering my fat quarter in satin. I'm glad I did, because it has such a nice soft feel to it. However, I wish I knew sooner that a satin fat quarter is bigger than a cotton fat quarter, since I could have made my book a little bigger.

I cut the pages out (leaving 2 pages each attached) and sewed them inside out with some thin batting. I then layered the pages together and sewed down the center to make a book.


My favourite page was one with our dogs, since he loves them already. I also put 2 layers of grocery bag plastic in the center pages for making noise.


I wanted to make some pages with interesting textures, so I included some of mommy's and daddy's hobbies: knitting, sewing, and woodworking.


I used piping on the cover edge, which turned out to be challenging because the satin is so slippery. Overall, I think it looks pretty good.