Scraplog

DIY: Making a Graph Paper Notebook

I am a list maker. I have little notes and papers scattered all over the house of lists and ideas that I’ve jotted down. I don’t necessarily like all the papers I have around but I know that if I don’t write it down, I will forget. A couple of years ago I bought for myself a little notebook so I could try and condense all my scribblings into one place. That little notebook ended up being only used for every jot & tittle. Then I had to have another notebook for house projects and ideas. Then another for beside my bed in my nightstand for if I thought of something before I drifted off to sleep. Another for photography and one for scrapbooking. One for planning parties. One for all of my Christmas ideas. And another for blogging. You get the picture. Now along with all of the little notes I have scattered around I also have notebooks in every nook and cranny! And you think I’m exaggerating. As I sit and type this I have 3 of my notebooks sitting next to me along with a pad of sticky notes and a paper mouse pad that has doodles all over it. It’s a sickness I tell you :) But, in some strange way it works for me and I know where everything is at and how to find that one idea I had 3 months ago!

Here lately it seems as though all my notebooks are starting to get a little full. It bothers me when I can’t keep them in some relative order and so I decided to buy one new notebook with dividers so I could condense some of the notebooks into one and carry it around with me in the house and theoretically, have most things in one place. We shall see how this works out for me!

So, now I was on the hunt for a new notebook. My criteria? Small size (I didn’t want a 8.5 × 11), dividers, spiral bound, and graph paper. For some reason this was impossible to find here in my town. After a futile search, I got frustrated and ended up buying some graph paper for $1.00 and headed home.

I had an old type writer’s manual and it ended up being the front and back cover.

I made the covers 8.25” x 8.25”. Next I grabbed my graph paper and some other papers (ledger, plain white, notebook, kraft) and cut them all to 8“x8”.

Next, I made some dividers for it using a manila file folder. I used one of my previous notebooks as a template for the new notebook. It had wonderful dividers with pockets so I basically copied it. I traced the old notebook’s pockets and made my own.

You can see I also added some clear baseball card sheets for those extra little pieces of scraps.

Then, I bound it all together using my Bind-it-all. It really was a simple project and now I have exactly what I want. The real test is to now see if I use it properly to cut down on my note clutter :)

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