Moleskine Cover

Here’s some photos of a moleskine cover my wife made with my pattern.

Leather is 6-7 oz. cut and engraved on the GF. Then dyed red with Fiebing leather dye. The white parts are acrylic paint. Then oiled and stitched together using white thread.

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I needed a quick present for a niece and, kind of wanted to try saddle stitching after seeing everyone here talking about it. I was able to adapt @jiva 's design to fit an inexpensive sketchbook of the same general size.

This is a “throw some art on it” rough draft but, I like how it came out enough that I am likely to do more.

I used the Saddle synthetic leather from Johnson. Engrave and cut was quick and easy once I got the settings sorted.

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Nice work! How did you do the design on the leather? Is it painted or engraved?

That’s just engraved. The black Saddle stuff engraves to a metallic silver (like the way two-color acrylic works). They also have a couple shades of brown that engrave to contrasting shades. Makes things quick and easy.

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I may have to look into that material. I LOVE the silver on Black look

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Oooh, goody! I just ordered some of that. Had I known it worked that nicely, I would have padded my order a bit more – I thought about it, to make up for the flat rate shipping, but didn’t want to end up with a bunch of stuff I couldn’t use, if it turned out not to be so great. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Wow, that is beautiful! Thank you for sharing.

OK- I know I disappeared from this conversation, but when I procrastinate on my Grad School homework, I go all the way. Here’s my first try at the notebook that was uploaded to the catalog and only the third thing I’ve done on my Glowforge. I ordered 5-6 oz veg tanned leather from Rocky Mountain leather, put blue painter’s tape on to mask it, then burned the design.

I filled in the Seal of Rassilon (yeah, I’m a major Whovian) with silver Eco-Flo, waited for it to dry and peeled off the masking. I’ll start sewing it up tomorrow, because I’m too excited and I’m going to do a modification on the design Annie posted above before I sleep tonight.

I have found my Glowforge calling, working with leather. I AM SO EXCITED, I can barely STAND IT. (Everyone in my house has already gone to bed, so forgive the giddy remarks, because there’s no one to share it all with right now.)

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I love the Calvin and Hobbs! I know it was designed to fit a Cahier, but do you think it would also fit a typical moleskine journal?

Love that! Thanks for sharing!

I love this! However when I open it up in Inkscape, the size dimensions wouldn’t work for a Moleskine. The dimensions I see are 9.35" wide x7" tall, which wouldn’t work for the 5" (so at least 10" wide) x8.25" tall Moleskine. Is there some scaling thing in Inkscape I’m missing? I am very new to it so I’m totally realizing it could be user error on my part!

The different design programs default to a different number of .dpi which will scale art (seemingly) randomly. You can do a search in here for “Inkscape scale” or similar and you’ll see a bunch of topics.

The (hopefully) quick fix is:
Under Edit > Preferences > Bitmaps
“Default Export Resolution” and “Default Import Resolution” should both be set to 96dpi. In older versions of Inkscape that was set to 90dpi by default and it caused problems.

Also in Inkscape, set the document size to 20"x12"

Fingers crossed!

@sarah_rigsbee: I think @deirdrebeth has the right answer to your questions (I made the design in Illustrator).

But another approach is to make a prototype to experiment. Print or laser etch onto something like cardstock and staple instead of saddle stitching to get a rough idea for how it would fit.

@annie.sullivan and @deirdrebeth thanks so much! I had done a test run on cardboard and thats how I noticed the difference in size. Thanks for all the tips, I am excited to get back in and play with it. :slight_smile:

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Hi! What size journal refill did you use in these?
Thanks!

Very nice to share something like this for folks in the forum. It’s really incredible the diversity in skills here. You have added something very cool indeed! Thank you!!