Don’t Be Precious, Use It
Alternative titles: Why I dissect old notebooks, How I use my sh*t, Chaotic Ramblings on a Chaotic Way of Using Notebooks
Some mind untangling scribbles with my favorite pen and a new brown ink (Anderillium Tolype Moth Warm).
I struggled with a topic for this week. It’s the end of the tourist season at work which somehow brings in the moodiest and neediest tourists all at once. It’s a lot of customer service wrangling for my introvert/anxious self. The only notebook that was bringing me any sort of order to my day was my weekly calendar (a Hobonichi A6 weekly insert) and my lined Odyssey 200 page Jupiter notebook. I don’t think it’s a coincidence they were both Tomoe River paper. It’s a familiar paper and it makes my inks pop.
The colors I had in my pens were stale to me and even though there was a little bit left to use in all of them, I did a massive pen cleaning and have only a few inked up now - my Kaweco liliputs (never not inked), my Kaweco Sport Iridescent Pearl, and my Kaweco Art Sport Tiger’s Eye. One round nib and three italic/stub grinds from three different nibmeisters.
I’ve been having itchy shopping fingers lately, which is a surefire sign that I need to dig into my boxes and use something I’ve already got.
In the spirit of Halloween, I will call this my own version of creating Frankenstein’s monster… although in this case it started out as a Hobonichi A6 notebook and has become something new. Alive… shall we say, haha.
This Hobonichi A6 notebook has been laying around my deskfor over a year. I started using it briefly, found myself never using it, put it away, took it back out again and used it for a few pages, put it away again… the cycle of having something you know you like, but for some reason can’t seem to use. It doesn’t help when the perfectionist vibe jumps in telling you that the notebook needs a clean purpose - you can’t just have random journal entries, workshop notes, story notes, and then random scribblings here and there. Which is nonsense, but my mind goes there.
The same thing has happened to me with some other thicker bound notebooks over time. I start to use them, lose interest and then find it hard to come back when I’ve used up part of it. Especially when I’m wanting a clean slate.
One way I mitigate this is tearing pages out of notebooks to rebind into TN inserts. This works for notebooks A5 and larger since I’m usually rebinding them into A6 size. So what to do with this A6 Hobonichi notebook that I wanted to use, but didn’t want to see my prior scribblings? I couldn’t just tear the pages out, fold, and re-bind them. My solution, cut the front part of the notebook off and put a new cover on it.
Tools were needed: a box cutter (an Exacto knife would have worked better, but a box cutter is what I had), some washi strips, some scrapbook cardstock, and a stack of stickers.
The tools of the notebook chopping trade.
Luckily, I was at the end of a signature so I was just able to begin cutting at the spine where the signature ended. Something I learned when cutting up a Stalogy just like this previously is that cutting the spines in between signatures is the best way to get a clean cut and not have pages falling out when the new cover is taped back on.
I tucked away the previous writings into one of my notebook storage boxes and now had a coverless partial notebook. Using my Fiskars paper cutter I cut a new A6 size cover from a piece of scrapbook cardstock (a Halloween release from Tim Horton’s from a few years ago). I cut a 2x6 inch piece from one of CoraCreaCrafts vellum background stickers for the spine. I really like these for the purpose of reinforcing the spines of my recently made notebooks. The stickers are strong and they keep things together.
To further fix the cover onto the new notebook I also stick a piece of washi tape on the inside, in this case I used one of Letras Litrerias washi tapes that I got from Amarillo Stationery.
The final step was to add a few stickers to the cover and tada! I have a new notebook made from things I already have.
New notebook on the left with the old front half on the right (it was originally started on a trip to Chicago via southern Wisconsin. I love to collect local brewery stickers.
It’s now ready to have some words thrown at it which will eventually become stories to be shared. A clean slate. No purchase required.
How do you revitalize something you’ve had laying around for a while?
Currently Inked
Papier Plume The Count - Kaweco Sport Iridescent Pearl M CSI - Papier Plume’s 2023 October special edition that I just had to grab. I love vampire stories and a vampire inspired ink like this was a must have. The ink itself is a deep burgundy wine color and it just exudes old world vampire elegance. The flow is good and you can get a little bit of shading to a more red tone. Really enjoying this one for the past few days. This ink is only available until the end of October so if you’re interested, you should check it out.
Ferris Wheel Press Song of Scarlet - Kaweco Art Sport Tiger’s Eye 14K M ‘selvedge’ - I’m in a spooky mood and I wanted a strong red, not too pink, orange, or brown. Song of Scarlet fits the bill with a blue shimmer bonus. It’s interesting to me that there have been a few releases by different companies of a red paired with blue shimmer, but it is a good combo. With this nib it looks very sharp and defined on the page.
Ferris Wheel Press Hearty Harvest - Kaweco Sport Macchiato 1.5 - The one survivor of the weekend ink purge. This is such a great fall orange and it really brings this week’s color scheme together.
Wearingeul Anubis - Kaweco liliput copper 14K B - Wearingeul’s dark inks fascinate me. A black or a brown is so often a plain color. Yet, they always manage to give it some depth. Anubis is a dark brown-grey with copper shimmer that is just really interesting. I was going back through some old notes and decided I needed to ink this one up again.
Anderillium Tolype Moth Warm - Kaweco fireblue 14K M ‘journaler’ - I have a soft spot for pale browns and when I saw this ink in San Francisco I had to pick it up. This is it’s first debut in one of my pens and I am not disappointed. This is a lovely neutral brown that looks rather vintage on the page. It has shading, which I love. This is definitely a color I will be coming back to again and again.
A spooky bottle of ink that I couldn’t say no to.