amidst graduation celebrations, I give you DIY Beer case notebooks
Materials; Empty beer case X-acto knife with fresh, sharp blade Bone folder pencil string Needle Screw the tape, not necessary 9 sheets of 8.5 / 11 paper stabby tool (not shown) or you can carefully use the needle
Cut all the excess material from the case so you have a nice flat sheet to work with. once cut down cut a sheet that is 9 in wide by 5.25 in tall, This will become your cover
measure in 4.25 inches on each side of your cover and with the bone folder score the marks to form the books spine
Cut a scrap piece of paper 5.5 inches tall and fold to find center this will be used as a guide for binding the book
mark the center, and put marks at 1.5 in from center and 2.5 in from center on both sides of the center mark
fold your guide in half so that the marks are on the edges and place it on the spine of your book just over the edge of the first spine crease with the Xacto make small slits across the spine at each mark
Fold one of the sheets of paper in half to find center
lay folded sheet on top of the rest of the stack, line up stack perfectly and lay ruler on center line Carefully cut the entire stack in half, it may take a few passes, although it is most important to keep your stack aligned, so proceed with caution
Fold each paper individualy for a exact and strong crease, make three signatures with 6 pages each.
Empty white space, move on
Place your guide in the center of your signatures and poke through each mark
so it looks like so
Do it carefully so that all the marks are alligned it should look like this. if not you fail
binding. Baically you are threading each signature to the binding through the slits. Its a beer notebook, not the most sophisticated thing, so go crazy. you really can’t mess this one up. Start from the back signature and add one signature on top after each signature is bound.
thread
knot paper
spine
go around spine and into next signature
Sweet! they make great gifts. you can make them out of any scrap cardstock including all sorts of food boxes. your friend loves captain crunch? vuela! make them a captain crunch notebook. they will love it guaranteed This book is technically called the Macgyver notebook because you can make it out of scrap found about anywhere. Plus Macgyver invented it in the 80s while he was in cambodia fighting aligator people. enjoy
When you come around to the last signature Tie it off.