A Paper Daybook

I decided to get the long weekend started out right, with a bookmaking workshop. Our fearless leader was none other than Juliayn Coleman of Book Island Bindery and my classmates included Kate, a friend from my binding certificate program, and Courtney Cerruti of Paper Musings. What was the class, you ask? Upcycled Daybook, of course. 
The task before us at the beginning of the day was to disbind a book, add new pages, including calendar pages, and then rebind the pages using the original front and back cover into a daybook for 2013. Challenging but also oh so much fun!

Our books were childrens' books. Mine was a biology book called Your Wonderful Body.

The old pages were mixed with pages from other unbound books, and also National Geographic pages. I, of course, chose the dinosaur ones.

We punched new holes and, since these books were going to have spines thicker than the originals, we sewed on tapes for extra support. I got a little excited about all the pages I could include and ended up with 19 signatures! I was really glad to sew on tapes.

To make the cover, we cut into the old front and back cover boards so that the spine cloth could be tucked inside and create a smooth transition from old cover parts to the new ones.

Then we cased in and had our daybooks! Now, I admit, I use my iPhone calendar all the time, at work I'm addicted to GoogleCal, and my daybook is pretty large and a bit unwieldy to be carrying around all the time. Still, after the first 2 days of living with it, I'm enchanted. I'm still in the process of adding all the dates, but it's nice to be writing by hand. I have a really busy spring and, aside from appointments, I've added my to-do list for the past two days and it lowered my stress to see everything in a list and to be able to cross things off, in the 'real world'. So all you digital crazed folks, go get yourself a daybook, or, better yet, make one.