This year seems to be the year of the notebook! I wrote about making a junk journal notebook, a library card one, and a cute little mini one.
I can’t help myself. They are so fun to make.
And, I have yet another idea for you!
I wanted to make a sample (or 2, or 3) for my grandkids to see when they made theirs. As you can see, the cover is made from a candy box. Sweet! (Pun intended, of course . . . )
Here are the things that you’ll need:
- a small notebook
- a empty candy box
- pencil
- scissors
- binder clip
- needle nosed pliers
- push pin
- awl
First, use the needle nosed pliers to straighten out one end of the wire binding.
Remove the wire from the holes by turning the wire around and around until it comes out of all of the holes.
Use 1 or 2 binder clips to hold the pages together. Set the them aside.
Carefully pull the candy box apart so that it is a flat piece of cardboard.
Trace around the notebook cover making sure that you are tracing around the part of the candy box that you want as your new cover.
Cut along the lines that you traced.
Place the regular cover over your ‘new’ cover. Using a pencil, mark where you’ll make the holes on your new cover.
Use a push pin to make a hole through every mark that you made.
You’ll need to make the holes bigger so that the wire will fit through them. Use an awl to do it.
Put your new notebook cover on top of the pages that are being held with the binder clips.
Wind the wire back through all of the holes. (I used a small wire cutter to cut off a little bit from the end of the wire because it was too bent to slip through the holes easily. Now, the wire will go back through the holes better.)
Once the wire is through all of the holes, use the needle nosed pliers to bend the end of the wire to keep it from coming back out of the holes.
Ta da! I have a notebook with a fun cover!
If 1 notebook is fun, 2 is even better!
Then I got thinking . . . What else could I use for a notebook cover?
Of course! The box from a 12 pack of Dr Pepper! (I like Dr Pepper 10 the best but since COVID hit, Dr Pepper 10 can no longer be found! Rats . . . )
For the notebooks my grandkids made, I bought individual boxes of sugar sweetened cereal. Yum!
We did the same things . . . taking apart the box so it was a flat piece of cardboard . . .
. . . eating the cereal . . .
But then! We noticed something! The cereal box was not as long as the notebook. Alas, it was shorter!
What to do? Oh, what to do?
We decided to Mod Podged the cereal box onto the front of the regular notebook cover.
It ended up being okay. If you didn’t look really close, you couldn’t tell that the cereal box cover was glued on top.
The grandkids didn’t mind. They liked their notebooks anyway.
(So here’s a piece of advice. As you’re walking around the store trying to decide what to use for a fun notebook cover, hold the notebook up to the box to make sure the box will be big enough.)
