Homemade notebooks
Sometimes I don't mind social media algorithms. When I browse reddit on my phone I use the official app. I didn't use to, but as I moderate /r/podcasts it's easier to use the official app for moderating tools1. It is objectively not as good as third-party apps, but the advantage to the official app is that it's free2.
One of the things the app does is throw in random posts that it thinks you will like based on your browsing history. Sometimes these bother me, because the algorithm will guess wrong and show me things I don't care about. Other times it shows me things that send me down fun rabbit holes. That's what happened yesterday.
What I first found was a post in /r/notebooks from somebody who asked about using an A6 notebook pages for an A5 page. Alex uses this for her journals and has written about it (sorry, I can't find the post), so it wasn't the idea of using an A6 size notebook as an A5-sized book; it's the lone comment that intrigued me:
I make my own A6 notebooks with Rhodia paper. I bought an A4 dotpad, 8 sheets cut in half is 16 sheets, folded in half gives me a 64 page notebook. I use card stock for a cover, and staple binding. I open them vertically and use them as an A5 sized page.
This innocent remark about making notebooks using a Rhodia dotpad got me started, but another thread that showed up in my algorithm sent me further:
Can’t get Field Notes. Making my own. Need ideas before I lose it. (/r/pocketnotebooks)
It was the top comment that sent me to a YouTube channel from a user by the name of Sea Lemon. There were other videos I watched yesterday but as attested to by /u/Aemilia these are the simplest to follow and a good way to get started for beginners.
I saved the videos I thought I'd find most helpful to a new private "Notebooks" playlist and this is something I want to play around with. I saw another comment on reddit (in one of the threads...can't remember which but it was probably from /r/pocketnotebooks) where users mention taking commercial cardboard boxes as covers - and I saw one person posting photos of their hommemade books with one sporting a No Name chocolate bar wrapper.
I'm going to try this myself - maybe with some loose regular lined paper I have - and see what I can do. There are various binding methods, a few using thread, but I think I'm just going to go with a simple staple binding first. The end goal will be to create some nice custom notebooks for my wife. She has some business trips coming up so it would be nice to put something together as a little surprise.
When I eventually get to this I will report back! But in the meantime, maybe this will be of use to some zine makers?
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