New Life for Old Notebooks

Hi! I'm happy that you're here.

I've been tidying my workspace and I came across a few old notebooks filled with ideas for this blog. Since they've been published here, I tore out the pages, put them through the shredder, and I'm left with these:

Surely I can turn the notebook covers and spiral wires from blah to TADA!, right?

Just as I did for this handmade notepad, D.I.Y. list pad and note on a rope, I'm making new notebooks out of old ones.

Start by untwisting the spiral wire from the empty notebooks.

Take several sheets of blank paper (I'm using colored card stock) -- we'll turn these into the pages of the new notebooks.

For the cover of the notebooks, I'm using this cute sheet of scrapbook paper.

Decide on how big you want the notebooks and cut the blank paper accordingly. You can also choose how many pages you'd like to have.

This notebook's size was dictated by the cover (cut from the scrapbook paper). 

I decided on 14 holes for my notebook with the aide of a hole punch. Depending on the thickness of your paper, you can stack the paper and punch in one go. Just make sure that all the holes align so that it's easy for the wire to go through. Repeat until you've completed all the holes. 

Take the spiral wire and trim it down with a wire cutter. Have a pair of pliers handy to unfurl any twisted ends.

Count 14 spirals to correspond to the 14 holes on the paper.

Neatly stack the cover and the pages, align the holes together, and thread the open end of the wire through the first hole, moving the spiral wire through all the holes. Curl the end of the ends of the spiral wire for safety by using a pair of pliers.

And look what we've got -- a sweet little notebook ready to be filled with new ideas.

Make as many as you like to keep or share. This is a pretty and practical way to turn old notebooks from blah to TADA! 

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