Day-Timer DIY make your own daytimer cover

DIY! Do it yourself. Here's how to make a cover for your compact Day-Timer (daytimer) wirebound  filler notebooks, the 3 x 5 inch size. Day-Timer is a popular brand of day planner or daybook. I used them back in the pre-phone days, and recently realized that you can do things with a little notebook that you can't with a phone, so I shelled out for a year's worth of wirebound filler notebooks, 2 pages per day. I wouldn't call this a hack; it's just a do-it-yourself cover.

The Day-Timer company wants an arm and a leg for a leather cover and not much less for a "bonded" leather one. They don't sell cheapo vinyl ones any more. THIS design costs less than $2 and will protect your notebook and fit in your pocket or purse.

The cover sewed together. Large rectangle, narrow rectangle,
large rectangle with slightly smaller pocket

How the pocket works

Day-Timer filler in cover

1. Get a sheet of 7 squares/inch needlepoint plastic mesh from Joann.
2. Cut two pieces 35 x 23 squares, making sure to leave the edge on. See enlarged picture to the right below. Scissors work.
3. Cut a piece 35 x 20 squares.
4. Sew the smaller piece (35 x 20) to the edge, top, and bottom of one of the large pieces for a pocket.
5. Cut a piece 35 x 3 squares.
6. Sew the edges so that the narrow piece is the spine and the other two pieces are the cover. Make sure the inner (open) edge of the pocket is toward the spine.
7. Slip the back cover of the notebook into the pocket.
8. Decorate as desired. You could do actual needlepoint on this (there is enough space vertically) or sew beads on especially if you use 10 to the inch mesh.

Cut so that the edge is smooth.

New pictures of 2008(?) "Delft" shawl and others using same pattern

This is the first shawl I made. I call it the "Delft" shawl.

• I used James G. Davis's "Easy Breezy Filet Square" pattern (Ravelry link), then available free online. This is a quite open pattern. The shawl is nicely warm without being hot. This is one of the projects shown on Ravelry for the pattern.
• It is in Red Heart Super Saver, which I do not use any more because it is rough.
• It is 15 blocks in white and three shades of blue, every block different. I don't know why I tackled such a difficult project. 
• I don't remember how I joined the yarn colors - didn't know the Russian join then. 
• Or how I sewed the blocks together - probably just a whip stitch instead of the much more more satisfactory mattress stitch.

For comparison, see fourth picture below for a shawl I did in spring 2019 using the same filet block pattern in multicolor.

(Top) Hanging on the fence in the back yard, with the fence color showing through the open stitches at the joins, and (middle) the 2007 or 2008 large me holding it in the parents' living room. (Below) A truer color image of the squares laid out but not joined yet.

And then there's

The multicolored shawl from 2019. It does not have the wide joinings like the other but I think it looks good anyway.

Here is a shawl ("the stained glass shawl) in progress with the same pattern:

Closeup of squares:

An old project, from 2014 or 2015

Bargello wall hanging in flame colors. I will finish it one of these days. The bargello part is done.

Thoughts about the Internet

These things have apparently dropped out of the collective memory of mankind:

• Red Label Liquid Paper - I think there was one reference in some antique document. Here is an image. Somebody was selling it on Amazon.
• old-fashioned Skrip ink with the little well on the inside of the bottle; actually, you can get these on eBay as vintage pieces - for decor? - but they are not available elsewhere.
• pin-up lamps (there are plenty of sconce lamps you screw into the wall but none that you hang on a nail). These are really nonexistent.
• pillowcase tubing by the yard - people don't know what this is.
• Localites, a sect of people believing that no church is valid except theirs because Paul wrote to "the" church in Corinth, "the" church in Rome, etc.; so there should be only one church per city and theirs is it.
• "Plasticstarch," a kind of starch for your shirts and dresses that held its starchiness through numerous washings.

Rule 34 says: If something exists, there is porn of it. Not so! There is no porn out there featuring geological charts (pre-Cambrian, Cretaceous, Tertiary, Pleistocene, etc.).

Bruges crochet: a subtype

This kind uses a shell stitch as the spine instead of a set of dc's. Here is a photo of a piece from a  doily design called Victoriana which I first found in a Dover book. You can see the pattern where it is for sale at vintageknitcrochet.net. I did just a swatch of it to learn how. Maybe I will design something using it that will be nice and fancy. Notice in the first picture how it resembles a bobbin lace net ground.

I have now done a test swatch and can report truthfully that doing it back and forth with a turn at each end and straight braid (see second photo) is dull as heck, and tedious. With some curves and loops it would be more interesting. I will fetch out the old Magic Crochet magazine with the ***** (very difficult) pattern in it and see if it inspires anything.

See last pictures for examples of "real" Bruges crochet. That is even more tedious. I guess it is supposed to look like some kind of tape lace, which itself is supposed to look like something else, some kind of bobbin pattern.

Variant Bruges (open spine, same as above commercial picture) by me.

"Real" Bruges by me. Extremely tedious.

Shaded blues, 2-strand, V-stitch

Done as of 5-22-19. Turned in June 20, '19, to church. Note one end has narrower stripes. It would have been 8 feet long if I'd continued the same size stripes and ended with white.

Two probably ten year old shawls at my mother's house

The pink one's edge just kept getting wider and wider. I don't remember why we hung on to the yellow one. Both are done in Lion Brand's "Delicate Web" pattern, which is exactly the same as Engineered Crochet's 10101.