Weekend Project: Teacher Gifts

Have you been following all of Sew, Mama, Sew's Handmade Holiday posts this month? In the Passion for Writing post, they featured these adorable mini memo-book covers, created by Larissa at mmmcrafts. I've had it in my head to give the boys' teachers, aides, and so on little notebooks along with the coffee gift cards, and I thought I'd make recycled scrappy notebooks, because really? They are very, very cute. But then I wondered if it would look a bit snarky to take all those one-sided pieces of paper from school and send them back to school as gifts, even if a main focus of the school's mission is environmental stewardship. I fear I already walk a fine line. So when I saw these adorable notebook covers, I decided to go with it. I already had everything I needed--except the mini notebooks--right in the studio. (I love that. I love a well-stocked studio!!)

Because I am absolutely enchanted with Kraft card stock lately, that's what I used to print out the template. I made a couple on Friday night, and learned that the fastener has to be quite loose and that I didn't like using embroidery floss so much for the tie closure, because it frayed quickly. (I think waxing, as she suggests, would help there. I did that on the second one and it was better.) Then the next day I began making these eight assembly-line style.

Here's a notebook-in-hand photo to give you an idea of scale.

I just can't get over how cute these are! I used the same paper on the spines of all eight (assembly line!) and twine for the closure, because I thought it went well with the brown cover and the colors of the paper (which is from the "Down Under" assortment of these decorative papers). These took the weekend mainly because of the gluing. At each gluing step, I pressed the join between the pages of a heavy book (my art history book gets so much use in the studio for pressing leaves and gluing things) before moving on. For the flaps on the side with the fastener, I had to do one flap at a time, with the covers sticking out from the book at an angle. The fastener gets in the way of doing both flaps at once.

Some of the notebooks wouldn't fit into the book covers correctly. For five of the eight, I sliced a teensy bit off one of the notebook covers--front or back, doesn't matter-- and that did it. I swapped them around to check; it wasn't the covers, it was the notebooks. A wee bit off is all it takes, since these covers fit just right.

When I began, I was thinking I'd stamp the front covers with something, but I don't know. I kind of like them plain. What do you think?