Fun Handmade Pocket Notebooks | Family Economics

By Cathe

Here’s a fun project to make your own pocket-sized notebooks using repurposed materials. You could use these for anything from sharing favorite recipes, keeping track of birthdays, passwords, daily journaling and funny things your kids say or even log your car’s service record.

Gather enough materials to make several notebooks to share with friends and family. These are really fun for kids to carry in their backpacks or to make themselves and exchange with friends. Tucking random pieces of paper and dividers into the notebooks can add extra fun and whimsy.

Use these as covers and optional subject divider pages, leave as is or trim to preferred notebook size:
• Playing cards
• Game cards
• Cereal boxes or other chipboard weight packaging
• Discarded paperback book covers
• Index cards or vintage recipe cards
• Postcards
• Old record album covers
• Greeting cards
• Flash cards
• Sports trading cards
• Heavy vintage printed pieces such as bingo cards

Use these as pages, trim to size of covers:
• Plain or colored office paper
• Vintage printed pieces
• Maps
• Graph paper
• Tracing paper
• Envelopes or envelope sections
• Photographs, new or old
• Coloring book or puzzle book pages
• Discarded book pages
• Sheet music
• Junk mail
• Magazine subscription cards

Use these items to embellish:
• Stickers and labels

For binding, use:
• Hole punch
• Office supply hinged binder rings
• Grommets
• String, twine, ribbon or yarn

Steps for assembling notebooks:
1. Hole punch covers and pages (small stacks at a time) in one corner.
2. Add grommets if preferred to cover holes.
3. Organize pages and dividers into a stack, place covers on top and bottom of stack.
4. Bind using hinged binder rings, or thread and knot holes with string, ribbon, twine or yarn.
5. For a more finished look, you can take your stacks of notebooks unbound to an office and print service center for custom spiral binding down the side for around $5 to $7 per notebook.