If you’re bored and you’ve got a sewing machine, paper, some scrap fabric, cardboard, and an itch to be crafty, read on! This is a super easy, one-day project and it makes for a great gift!For one of my college roommate’s 20th birthday, I decided to make her a notebook – completely from scratch! Her birthday was May 16th and it is now June 8th and I’ll have to mail it to her in L.A… But it’s the thought – and not the tardiness – that counts, right? :)
The Easy-Breezy Handmade Notebook
1. You’ll need to assemble the signatures for the meat of the notebook. A signature is one section of folded paper. For my notebook, I used 8 signatures of 5 sheets of paper each – folded in half, this adds up to 10 pages per signature, or 80 pages total. Your pages can be any size you want. Mine are about 4 x 5.38 inches. I tore the lined paper out of an old notebook I had lying around – I didn’t buy anything for this entire project! Just used stuff that was strewn around the house :).
2. Next, you have to stitch all the signatures together using a coptic stitch. This type of bookbinding has been around since the 4th century A.D., so it’s tried and true! You can find a fantastic coptic stitch tutorial here: http://www.booklyn.org/education/iscoptic.pdf.
3. Set this aside – you won’t need it for a while. Now you need a cover, back cover and spine! Cut these out of cardboard. Measurements will vary depending on how many signatures you use and how big your pages are. For my notebook, the covers are about 4.25 x 5.75 inches. I flattened my cardboard a bit so it wouldn’t be so bulky and/or cause my sewing machine to have a panic attack. (I used the TV remote to hammer it down and got yelled at by my parents – I suggest you use a shoe or something less breakable.)
4. Cut out a piece of fabric large enough to lay the cardboard pieces side by side with about ¼ inch between each and enough around the edges to fold over and sew.
5. Now for the fun part – sewing! Start with one cover and sew down the fabric around 3 of the edges (tucking in the corners of course).
Sew down the 4th side as well, but don’t fold to fabric over – remember, you’ll need it for the spine and other cover! Sew all 3 pieces in place with that ¼ inch space between each. It should look like this when finished:
6. Glue a piece of paper (regular printer paper or fabric if you want) flat onto the entire thing to cover up all the not-so-pretty fabric remnants on the insides of the covers! I used contact cement to glue it down because that’s all we have at my house, but you can probably use rubber cement or hot glue as well.
7. Final step! Insert your booklet of signatures (they should fit snugly into the binding). Hand-stitch the first and last signatures to the spine (through the cardboard and all the way to the outside). Make sure to tie secure knots so the paper doesn’t fall out.
8. Voila! You’re done! :)
