Every year I reassess how I keep track of all the different areas of my life and try to find better ways of being organised. This years Christmas treat is a Midori Traveler's Notebook. I have wanted one for ages - they are a leather cover which hold a number of notebooks - held in with an elastic band system which means the notebooks can easily be swapped around and replaced.
I'm still waiting for it to arrive but in the meantime decided to have a go at making my own refills. I use a fountain pen - and although the Midori paper is supposed to be excellent, I know from experience that companies often change the paper in their products without warning. Also, I need about seven different notebooks to cover all the different areas I need to organise which would make it really expensive over the long term.
The size of the notebooks is A5 height but much thinner so I printed out some A4 paper with the lines going vertically - that way I just needed to print , fold, stitch and trim. The pdf for the paper is available from
DOWNLOADS. I stitched them together with some recycled card covers.
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| booklets with recycled covers |
I then decided to see if I could make a cover - that way I could keep my studio notebooks separate from every thing else. I had an old leather wrap for A5 notebooks which seemed ideal and found a few large elastic hair bands - punched holes in the leather and attached with a couple of toggles. There were holes in the leather already for ties so I doubled up an elastic band to hold it all together when closed. The result is below.
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| cover with inserts |
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| inserts held in with elastic bands |
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| cover closed with elastic band |
I still need to tweak it a bit - think it will be better with a thinner elastic and I'm not happy with the way the toggles/ elastic looks on the spine so I shall do some more work on it - but it does work as intended and cost nothing so overall quite happy with the result.
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| Final version - thinner elastic and only one toggle. Total cost 18p. |
