Notebooks

I make little notebooks, small enough to fit in a pocket, made of fine and decorated paper. We’re surrounded, waist deep, in photocopy paper.  It’s a good product but boring!

We should have elegant paper with a little texture (25% cotton wove by Neenah Paper), paper that’s 32 lb (not quite a card but close), delicate paper handmade in Tibet or Japan, off-white or cream colored paper, light watercolor paper by Arches or Strathmore.

I paint large sheets with kids’ tempera or watercolors in big, sweeping strokes, flick water colors on them, draw on them with chalk or crayon (these have to be interior pages or glued chalk side down), glue left-over bits of decorated paper on them.

I cut the decorated and writing sheets to size using a piece of glass, compile the booklets, drill and stitch the interior pages (I cannot make tying the knots fun), paste on the covers (the paste 1 to 5 tablespoons flour to water cooked in a small skillet),

press the booklets (to reduce buckling and wrinkling), fold and cut them. Cute little things.  What to do with them?

Fortunately, Dorothy’s fellow nursing students have expressed an interest in having them. They fit perfectly in the pockets of their scrubs. It seems that they need to make notes on the event of their days.
Wow! Marianne Case’s 4th graders know something about how to use notebooks! Look here (I’d have put up even more if I were better at grabbing images from Facebook. Marianne sent lots of sweet pictures of what her students did.)

Now there’s a reason to make decorated notebooks!