Vintage Advert Notebook

I finally broke down and bought a binding machine. I’d been eyeing one online for quite sometime and when it happened to be on sale at a local store—I gave in. I’d resisted the urge to get one for a while because I didn’t need one but as with most crafty items I wanted it. [Sigh.] I really just tried to avoid the inevitable…and that never really works.

Since my mom’s birthday was just around the corner, I thought it was the perfect time to test my new binding machine by making a notebook. My mom enjoys classic Hollywood films from the “Golden Age” of cinema when screwball comedies and musicals reigned supreme, so I wanted to reflect that time period in the notebook I made for her. I had purchased a stamp that had various newspaper ads from that 1940’s and thought that I could use it to create a cute cover.

I generally like to keep things simple and I am sort of a sucker for natural-looking materials. I selected chipboard for the cover since it had some thickness and I thought the brown color would lend itself well to the vintage-feel of the stamp. I stamped the chipboard sheet repeatedly with my stamp (while alternating its orientation) to give it a continuous and directionless look (akin to wrapping paper). Then I cut up the chipboard and white paper to size and bound it with my new machine.

The one thing that I’m not really crazy about is the black coil I used for the binding because it doesn’t really match well with the brown cover. I sort of randomly bought black coils before I really thought about what kinds of covers I’d be making (and I was too lazy to go back to the store and exchange them). But other than that, I think it was a pretty successful first notebook using my binding machine.