Making Your Own Simple Notebooks

     Hello everyone!

     Having stumbled across a YouTube video a while back about how to make your own mini notebooks using a stapler and rubber (or eraser for my American readers), I’ve found myself with a lot more notebooks than I need so if any of my pen pals are reading this and you’ve recently gotten a notebook from me – now you know why! But they are fun to make and so many of the papers I have make for very pretty notebook covers, especially the seaside set of papers I got from Paperchase a while back.

     So, this spat of notebook making is because of the trick I learned from this YouTube video. If your stapler can’t reach the centre of the pages to staple together, the trick is to put the rubber underneath the pages, open the stapler up and then staple so that it goes through the pages and sticks into the rubber. The staple comes out of the rubber really easily and then you just fold the pieces in yourself. It’s so easy!

     This beach hut notebook is the first I made. It’s A5 in size and contains only 10 sheets (5 A4 pages folded in half), as I wasn’t sure at first how many pages with card my stapler could handle.

     For a first attempt is didn’t turn out too bad. I stuck A5 card on the front and back inside to make the cover nice and sturdy although I didn’t quite get the card stuck down on the very edges of the front so it’s not as neat as it could be – lesson learned!

     I got a bit more adventurous with my next A5 notebook – I made a bit of an odd notebook and envelope pocket combination. I thought these two pieces of paper from the Paperchase pack looked quite good together so I wanted to combine them in some way.

     I made the notebook the same way as the first, although I added more pages to this time so it has 20 pages (10 A4 sheets folded in half), or 40 pages if you want to count both sides. Then, with the second 12×12 sheet of paper, I made a large envelope which turned out ever so slightly bigger than the notebook, and I stuck the back cover of the notebook to the back of the envelope so that you can use it as a nice big pocket.

     For closing, you wrap the envelope flap around over the closed notebook and wrap the twine around a few times, either tying it shut or just loosely wrapping it like I’ve done above around something like this anchor which I’ve attached to the envelope flap. (I got the anchor in a pocket letter I got from Myra, although I have painted it grey here to match the look of the papers – it had been pink – and actually, grey is the only paint I own so thankfully it’s what I needed!).

     I figure I’d stamp something on the cover of the notebook so I went with ‘travel log’. I think using it as a travel journal would be an appropriate use of this. I would have stamped ‘travel journal’ but ‘journal’ would have been too long and gotten covered by the envelope flap when it’s closed . I wanted to be able to see both words fully and thankfully ‘log’ just fit underneath ‘travel’.

     Very quickly, I’ll show you this third notebook I made, a very simple A6 size one:

     There’s nothing special about it, it’s just paper and a card cover, but it is a rather pretty card cover and I love the autumn feel it has.

     I’ve made a lot more notebooks but I won’t show you them all or we’d be here for a rather long time and I’ve got other crafts to be making. Let me know what you think of these or if you’ve tried making your own notebooks, share in the comments below!