Upcycled notebooks

• Posted on 15th August 2012
• in Uncategorized
• by catherine

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This is actually part two of my ‘Gifts for men’ blog post, the first part was a comic book messenger bag in my last blog post. The idea for the upcycled noteboks actually came as a by-product of making the bags as I didn’t want to waste the cover but then I got quite into the idea of giving old book covers a new lease of life as notebooks…

I found these gorgeous 60s style books in a charity shop, for 20p each as they were in French. I thought they were rather lovely. This is the how-to:

Remove the pages and the covers. I then wrapped the covers in a layer of sticky backed plastic to seal off the raw edge. For the Tintin book, I selected a smaller area of the book cover, which looks quite effective if you have a large comic book or album.

Cut a stack of notepaper (I bought a load of notebooks from Poundland!). Punch holes for binding in them.

Now I actually have a Zutter Bind-it-all machine, so for me this was a bit easier than it maybe if you don’t have one, but you can easily punch holes with a standard hole puncher and then bind the whole notebook with book binding rings that are available from stationers. They look like the rings you find inside a ring-binder. You may findit tricky to punch throught the hard covers, but if you have a Crop-a-dile or a punch for making holes in leather that’ll do the job. If not, you’ll need to use a bradawl and wiggle it about to make a big enough hole.

Cut pretty patterned paper to line the inside of the notebooks if you like. I happened to have a lot of this lying around because I scrap, but for the inside of the Tintin book  I just used the fly pages from the comic book itself.

Bind it all together and enjoy!