Leather-bound notebook

Following on from the pen and pencil projects I figured I'd continue on with the stationery theme.

Like most people who've ever taken notes, I have a lot of half-used notebooks gathering dust, leaving a large stockpile of perfectly good paper not getting used simply because it's bound to some other paper that did.

I'd been thinking about trying a book-binding type project anyway, so figured why not save a few steps and do some up-cycling in the process.

The candidate books are some school-exercise-book style notebooks.

These are great candidates because they are only bound by 2 staples and each book is a single stack of folded paper.

There's a detailed Instructable for this, which I used heavily for this project, so rather than reinvent the wheel, I'm only going to detail the areas where my process differed from theirs.

To start with, I removed the covers from 4 of the blue books.

To get the fabric for the binding, an old t-shirt was sacrificed.

I oversized the measurements for this bit, so that I could pin the fabric to a scrap backing board, to hold it taut while I mounted the folios.

I put clips each end of the stack of paper, painted some PVA glue onto the fabric, and then added the spines of the paper. Doing it this way around prevents the glue leaking between the pages and fixing them together.

The resulting object was surprisingly stable enough to move somewhere safe to dry.


In the meantime I started preparing the cover as per the instructables instructions. However the leather that I had for the cover was slightly too narrow to have the one inch border that it instructs, but still have enough material to wrap around, so I'd be working with narrower margins.

In addition, in order to be able to fold the leather over to create a neat edge, it needs to be thinned. I did this using a combination of skiving tool and sanding, to thin the material around the border.

After that it was just a case of following the rest of the instructable. For the lining paper I used some of the card I had left over from the Picture Frame that I did a while back.

To finish it off I added some brass corners, and that was it. Not perfect by any means, but very happy with it as a first attempt.

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A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Jun 28, 2019 at 10:46am PDT

Farcry-inspired Leather Notebook part 2

In my last post, I started making a leather notebook inspired by Farcry. For the first part of this build, click here.


Paper
I opted to use a mix of papers in the notebook, so it could be useful in multiple situations - I included lined, plain, squared, and sketch (plain, thicker stock paper).





Pen Loop
I wanted to get some practice using hardware with the leather, so I used a scrap of leather of approx 1 inch width, wrapped it around a pen for size, and trimmed it to create a pen loop, which I fixed to the left of the notebooks cover flap, so it would sit in the fold opposite the spine, which will help balance out the overall thickness of the notebook (to help achieve the stated aim of keeping it pocket-size).

The Cover

I shaped the cover with a curve, and added an eyelet hole. This is to thread a leather lace to act as a closure for the book.

The lace itself, was literally a leather shoe lace - I had to cut it short, and slice it lengthways to fit the eyelet.


The Farcry journal had a small metal charm-type item on the end of the lace, which serves as kind of latch mechanism, as well as having it's aesthetic appeal.

I didn't have anything particularly symbolic or meaningful, but I did have a small hollow metal die that came from a Christmas cracker, and a metal hook. I filled the hollow die with contact cement and screwed in the hook, giving it time to set, then tied that into the other end of the lace.

The finished notebook

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Jan 17, 2017 at 2:16pm PST

Despite the caption, I think this project will be one I never really consider 'finished'. There are plenty of things I would change if I re-did the project, but given that this is my first attempt at making something with leather, I'm very pleased with how it's turned out. I'll definitely be keeping leather work in my repertoire.


I envision that as a project book, it will be modified and tinkered with as I learn new things and will be a bit of a 'test bed' - two things that immediately spring to mind is the finishing of the materials' edges, and embossing a logo or emblem into the cover.

Farcry-inspired Leather Notebook

This year I resolved to pick up a new skill.

A key game mechanic in Farcry 4 is the survival and "living-off-the-land" aspect of the fictional island of Kyrat. Part of this aspect is hunting, and using the pelts to craft useful items, such as backpacks, holsters etc.

That, coupled with seeing some leatherwork done by Jimmy DiResta in his videos, inspired me to have a go and teach myself some leathercraft.

For a first project, I decided to make a leather notebook, based of this faux-leather journal that came with the collectors edition of Farcry 4 (left).

I'm the kind of person whose idea of a notebook is usually a sheet of printer paper folded into four. I usually start using a notebook, only to find various flaws that stop it fitting into my workflow - like being too large to fit in a pocket, getting left behind, nowhere to add additional sheets, etc. So this seems like a good chance to make something exactly how I want it.





Spec

Essential:

• Refillable using cheap paper (ie, printer paper folded into four)
• Fit in the back pocket of a pair of jeans.

Other nice-to-haves:

• Mix of paper - it'd be handy to have lined, plain, squared/graph paper in one notebook.
• Space for printouts/other paper - some kind of pocket.
• Pen loop

Process
The size was based around a sheet of A4 paper folded into quarters, with approximately 1 inch added for the spine.

Another layer of leather was added in the spine to strengthen it, and fixed with contact cement.
Four loops of thread, stretching from top to bottom of the spine were added, approx a quarter inch apart. This will be where the paper is mounted - either I can use it for four different types of paper, or treat it as four sections for different projects.

A second outer layer of leather was added to the back, the same height as the main section, but wider (total width approx 300mm. This excess piece would create the wrap-around cover for the book.)



I misjudged the behaviour of the main front and back cover - I thought that the double layer of leather would behave as though they were a single, thicker layer. However, I found when folding them, the inner layer would bulge out slightly, so I was concerned about using contact cement to join them.

Although this did create an opportunity - stitching each side and the base of each cover meant that I could leave the tops open and create pockets for printouts and other papers.

This finished off the main structure of the notebook, with the next steps being to refine it and add finishing details (and of course, paper), which I will cover in a later post (Update - Part 2 is here)