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Step 1
Gather together your ingredients. The size of your greetings card doesn’t matter, although if you’d like to use the notebook as a handy jotter and carry it with you, a smaller sized card is better. Your scrap paper can be from a variety of sources and vary in colour and thickness, e.g. junk mail, envelopes. It doesn’t matter if one side has been written or printed on, as long as the other side is suitable for notes. The size of the paper should be the same size or bigger than the card.

Step 2
Measure your greetings card. You will then need to cut the height and width of your scrap paper 1cm shorter than your card. Our card measured almost 13cm high and wide, so we cut our scrap paper into squares measuring 12cm. The easiest and quickest way to do this is to use a guillotine, but it can also be done with scissors, marking the measurements with a ruler and pencil first. Scrap paper with printing on one side can be folded in on itself to form one folded page with 2 blank sides for writing on.

Step 3
Stack your cut to size scrap paper. To make a more interesting and mixed notebook randomly arrange difference coloured or textured paper. Make sure that any folded pages are arranged with the folded side on the outer edge of the notebook – the opposite side will be bound. We used 33 pages in our example as the thickness of these fitted comfortably into our card. Keep checking and add as many sheets as suit.

Step 4
Take your greetings card and punch it with the double-hole punch as far in as possible along the folded edge. Make sure that your holes are equally spaced from the top and bottom edge of your card. Repeat with the scrap paper until all pages are punched.

Step 5
Take a 30cm piece of wool, string, ribbon, raffia, shoe-lace, electrical wire or other similar thread which colour co-ordinates with the front of your card. Open your card and pass the two ends of thread through the holes in the back cover. Thread on the pages and finally the front cover. Tie the two ends of thread in a neat bow. Make sure that your bow is not too tight as this will restrict you when opening the notebook. Treasury tags also work well as an alternative to thread.

Step 6
Your notebook is now finished! Renew from time to time by simply ripping out, shredding and recycling written-on pages, then threading on new pages of scrap paper (cut to size and hole-punched). By re-using a greetings card from a friend or other loved-one it will always be a nice treat to re-read their original message when you get to the last page of your notebook.

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