Small Paper Crafting Project: Covered Notebooks

The ladies in our Relief Society are putting together boxes of gifts for the young missionaries.  One of the things we are doing is to contribute top-bound spiral pocket notebooks. I loved that idea and wanted to make some.  My first effort was to make one from scratch.  It turned out that I did not have the most important tool I needed...the hole punch.  This made me remember fondly the industrial paper punch/binder I left in Vermont.

To make a long story shorter, I decided to take some already-made notebooks and cover them with pretty papers.  Even here there was a learning curve!  It turns out that beautiful heavy card stock is NOT the thing to use.  At least not on this iteration.

The final time through I used regular "Recollections" paper (the Fashionably Chic 6 inch by 6 inch pad that I got at Michaels) and was successful.

1. Choose the paper.
2. Remove the binding coil from the notebook.  Save it carefully.  Too bad to have it roll under the table and get stepped on...
3. Cut the paper to the correct size.  In this case the notebook was 3" by 5" so the paper was cut 4" by 6".
4. Place the cover face down on the paper then fold up the paper, long sides first, then short sides.
5. Cut a triangle off each corner of the paper about 1/8 inch away from corner to reduce bulk when glueing.
6. Using DRY glue, put glue on all folded edges. I used double-sided tape until it ran out, then a glue-runner.
7. Press the long glued edges to the back side of the cover and press down well.  Glue down the top and bottom of the decorative paper to the back of the cover. Press well.
8. Use another piece of the same (or coordinating) paper that is about 2 1/2 inch by 3 3/4 inch and dry glue down, covering completely the back side of the cover.
9.  It is handy if you remember which end is the one with the punched holes for the coil binding.  Either way, now take the back cover and lay it on top of the front covered cover and use a paper punch to punch out the holes for the coil to be re-inserted.  I used a Japanese screw punch to make the holes.  I am too cheap to buy a Cinch machine...but also, I don't like their binding wires, so this punch worked for me.
10.  Re-insert the coil you took off at the beginning.  Remember to press it together so the coil stays on the notebook.

You could repeat this process with the backs of the notebooks, but I chose not to after the first two did not work as well as I had hoped.

To make the back covers a little bit more interesting, I punched a flourish out of white card stock, wrote a scripture reference and Merry Christmas on it then wet-glued the flourish onto the bottom of the back cover.  Not classy or anything, but more interesting than nothing, and the scriptures are good ones...! In my opinion.

You can see that I started out covering the backs BUT they were kind of nasty.  Not so nasty that I didn't give them to the missionary box.  Some missionary will probably not mind too much.