DIY // how to make a durable book cover

Welcome to a DIY tutorial! Today I want to discuss how to make an easy, durable book cover that looks way cooler than the cover on the book / journal / diary you currently own. 

Materials you'll need:

- Book of some sort (I have a generic spiral bound diary)

- Something to cover it with (I have green card and a picture I painted myself)

- Packing tape (use the clear stuff!)

- Scissors

I'm obviously going to do this slightly differently to how you'll do it since no two people are the same, but I'm sharing how I went about doing mine anyway. :)

These are the materials I have. The long thing at the top is a paper cutter (which I got recently - it's fabulous) and I'm going to use it to cut up my painting I want to use on the cover.

Cutting the painting to size. The painting was like a two minute thing I did to use up some leftover red paint, lol! Always save leftover paint! :D

The painting is cut to size now.  I'm going to glue it onto the green card (after I cut that to size first of course). This will give me the size I need and also make it a bit more interesting.

Lining it up to make sure everything fits

Mustn't forget to write on the cover what you want it to say!! I nearly did, oops. :P

Gluing the painted bit

there now it's stuck on. :)

Alright now here's the bit you need to take notice of. Once you have your cover and it's the size and shape you want and it's exactly how you like, cut a section of packing tape and just tape down one side of the cover. Having the clear packing tape over the cover will give it a nice layer of protection.

The inside of the cover. Just so you can see what I did there.

And the outside, with one line of tape.

Continue putting tape over the cover, in long neat vertical strips. Overlap the tape a tiny bit so you don't have any paper or card poking out uncovered. Try your best not to let the tape wrinkle or pucker (this is really hard, good luck :P ). Push it down really firmly. 

So you can see better the 'lines' of where the tape overlaps. I think it looks fine and the lines don't bug me. If they bug you, just get over it because I don't think there's many ways you could fix it. 

The inside of the cover so you can see where the tape is folded over. Of course this looks a bit messy so I suggest you get a piece of paper, cut it to size and glue it there as a nice inside cover. It will hide the unsightly tape ends nicely and give you something else to do with your time. 

And that's that! Easy peasy, wasn't it? :)