How To Make a Very Simple Notebook
Recently in the MadeStuff house there has been a tidying up effort. Many of our supplies have been stored in the one room that we really need to renovate so Alasdair has been busy boxing up supplies and moving them to another room while I’ve been busy making new things out of old supplies!
Last year we had a load of photos printed for sale at craft fairs and spent many hours mounting them. There’s only so much mounting that you can stand so naturally there were some left over. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been making notebooks with the leftovers and I want to share with you how to make them.
The first thing you need to do is find a nice size of photo (ours are 6×8) and remove any white space from the top and bottom.
Then you need some paper that is cut to be bigger than your photo height and width, quite a bit bigger or you’ll struggle to cut the pages square. You need several sheets of paper (I had 7 to give my book 28 pages).
Fold the photo in half widthways and mark 1cm intervals right down the middle of the fold (on the unprinted side). Try and leave the same amount of space at each end.
Fold your paper in half and place each sheet of paper on top of the other, with the photo on top (wrong side up).
Take a large book such as the phone book, or I used the Screwfix catalogue and open it towards the middle. Place your pile of paper and photo so the the fold of the pile sits in the spine of the book.
Take a dressmakers pin, or drawing pin, or any sort of pin (you might have the proper tool, I don’t) and stick it through the pile of paper at the marked 1cm intervals. Make sure each hole goes all the way through.
Once all of the holes have been made take the photo from the top of the pile and put it on the bottom, photo side out.
Take a long length of strong thread and start sewing a running stitch through the holes to sew the pages together. When you get to the last hole, sew all the way back to the top again. Secure with square stitches and cut the end off. You could also attach beads to the ends for a decorative bookmark.
Close the book over and use a paper cutting knife to trim the edges square all the way through. If you’ve got access to a guillotine then I suggest you use that to save your hands the pain of cutting through pages and pages of paper.
Put the closed notebook under something heavy to encourage it to stay closed.
That’s it…seemed easier to do than to write down so I hope that’s easy enough to follow.
I added some nice cellophane and button packaging which you could do if you want to give one of your hand bound books as a gift.



















