How To Make Your Own Notebook

How to make your own notebook – Do you like colors? And paper? And sewing? What about sewing a notebook tailored exactly to your taste? Oh, you’ll love this one. It’s an easy, step-by-step tutorial to make adorable homemade notebooks. And that using one single straight stitch on your sewing machine. Make it just the way you like it! Also, feel free to add these free printable tags I offered a while ago.

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See how to make your own notebook (or ten) and enjoy this easy crafting project. I made 8 diy notebooks in half an hour – and that includes taking photos and selecting the colors!

You will need:

5 sheets of A4/lettersize paper per notebook, each cut in half (=getting 10 sheets)
one piece of A5/half-letter size paper for the notebook cover (something you really like 🙂
a piece of other colored paper, to use it on the cover
scissors or cutting knife
sewing machine
optional: decorative materials (scrapbooking stickers, washi tape, these free printable tags)

The paper for the inside of the notebook can be white or – even better – use the lightly colored ones – and they even do not need to be the same color. I mixed whites and pastels.

Steps to Make A Notebook:

1) Folding and assembling: fold the 10 sheets of A5 paper and the cover page in half. Assemble the inside sheets together, and put the cover on the outside. (The photo shows the 8 sets I made initially, you’ll only have one.)

3) OPTIONAL: you can add ornaments or a small rectangle of another colored paper on the front part. You can simply glue these extra parts to the cover, or sew them like I did. (I just looove the zigzag stitch, can you tell?)

4) Sew through the entire pile of paper using the regular straight stitch. Just follow the fold, it’s even simpler than it looks.

5) Secure the stitches: tie a knot at the beginning and end of the stitch and cut off the excess thread. As you’ll notice, I hid the knots on the inside part of the notebook.

6) Cut off any excess paper if you like an extra even edge. Now, you’ve made yourself a beautiful notebook. Enjoy!

So this is was my current collection of DIY notebooks:

BONUS HINT No 1: Actually, you can make them even prettier and more personalized by adding any paper crafting decorations you can think of. You might want to use some of these ideas:

1) Washi tape. These cute pieces are selling like hotcakes on Etsy.

2) Fun scrapbooking stickers, like these.
3) But you’ll get the most for your money if you get yourself some STAMPS (you can make literally hundreds of marvelous cover pages using one single stamp 🙂

These have been marked down as I’m writing this, but find them just beautiful

BONUS HINT No 2:

You’ll notice that it is impossible to stop at one single piece of notebook and might soon realize you’ve made too many of them… But don’t worry, they’ll make a perfect diy present 🙂

Save this crafty idea for later:

More DIY tutorials on its way – stay tuned! Happy crafting!

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Comments

Sylvia Harrow says

August 7, 2020 at 2:33 pm

What size of machine needles did youuse for the paper notebook?

- Damjana says
  
  August 7, 2020 at 3:11 pm
  
  Sylvia hi,
  a great question! It’s been such a long time since I did this tutorial. What I’m sure is that I used Universal needles, not the thinnest ones – I’d say these were in the 80-90 range. Hope this helps,
  
Richella Parham says

August 7, 2014 at 1:38 pm

What a great idea! This would be a wonderful little gift!

- Damjana says
  
  August 7, 2014 at 6:55 pm
  
  Richella,
  thank you so much for dropping by, I’m happy you’ve found me. The blog is not even two months old! 🙂 Have a wonderful weekend, Damjana
  
Cathy McInnes says

July 15, 2014 at 10:37 am

This is really cool! I love that you sewed a notebook! 🙂
Cathy @ three kids and a fish

- z0fLfGKfaVUocFGPHFlJIJQQwp6719 says
  
  July 15, 2014 at 12:34 pm
  
  Thank you, the pile of those notebooks in more 'cheerful' colors is getting bigger and bigger 🙂