Cubicle Crafts: Cardboard Inspiration Notebooks

[mylittleredgirl]

I love notebooks. Love. However, I'm obnoxiously picky about them - they need to have hard backs (none of this flimsy stuff!), but the front cover also needs to be able to fold behind the back all the way, so hard-backed journal-type notebooks won't work. I also want to be able to easily remove pages without making it look ratty. Once I could drive, back-to-school shopping became an epic tour of every stationery store in the state. If I found JUST the right notebooks, it was an auspicious omen for the school year!

I'm not in school anymore, but these notebooks (almost) make me wish I were!!



Supplies:
Paper (1-sided non-confidential paper rescued from the recycling bin at the office, or to be schmancy, use actual store-bought filler paper!)
Thick corrugated cardboard (from shipping or paper boxes)
Scissors or an x-acto knife
Split rings - mine are called "Loose Leaf Book Rings" when I order them
3-hole punch (for the paper) and a 1-hole punch (for the cardboard - though you could try to use the 3-hole punch!)

How-To:






Text version:
1) Assemble your supplies.
2) 3-hole punch your interior paper.
3) Measure and cut your cardboard covers. I recommend your cover dimensions be 1" bigger each way than your paper, so it can hang over on each side (so for the full-size version, covers are 9.5"x12"). Round the corners.
4) Using a hole-punched page as a template, mark where the holes need to be punched on the covers. The split-rings I have are 1" diameter, so I put the hole a little more than 1/2" in from that edge.
5) Hole-punch the cover.
6) Assemble your pages using split rings.

You can easily add or remove pages by just opening the rings again (hint: academic handouts or pretty magazine pages)! Either leave it as-is for a more industrial look, or decorate with whatever you like! You may notice that the paper has "graph paper" printing on it -- I just downloaded some free graph paper from the internet and printed a few sheets, since I love graph paper, and filler graph paper is ten gajillion dollars a pack.

I also made a smaller, 1/4 page version, and cut out little file-folder tab pages from cardstock to divide different sections.


*note: Those reams of paper are not related to this project.

Comments

[mylittleredgirl.livejournal.com]

I'M SO IN LOVE! Originally I was thinking of making this a craft inspiration notebook and just gluing cool things to the pages / hole-punching pretty magazine pages / etc... but now I kind of want to go buy filler writing paper and use that instead!

Try as I might, I just can't love writing on non-lined paper.

[havocthecat]

Is it wrong I want to make one of those and then decoupage awesome pictures to the front? *ponders*

[mylittleredgirl.livejournal.com]

Dude, that's totally what I'm going to do!!! It's not only RIGHT, it's DECREED. You must!

I wonder if I made journal-sized ones and made the covers pretty (with fabric! and buttons! or clever magazine collageness!) and put them on Etsy, I could guilt people into actually buying them for money. (My sister is now on etsy and nags me constantly to Start Selling Things, but I am all, What Could I Possibly Sell That People Would Want? So I've been puzzling on this!)

[melyanna.livejournal.com]

I think you probably could, especially if you had options for lined and unlined paper. (I might not do buttons on sketchbooks just because they might make things wobbly.) But there are people selling notebooks and journals on Etsy!