Notebook From Old Candle (well... Kind Of... Sort Of...)

Yes, I know, you're confused. I'll get to the "candle" part in the next step. But first I want to say that it's not the first time I'm making notebooks from all sorts of stuff so I recommend to go and look for more here.

Step 1:

Well, ok, I lied it is not made from candle (and I'm going to burn in special type of hell for people, who make misleading titles for this) ... and the candle itself is not old but rather prematurely disfunctional... But, despite all the sadness of it's current state it was wrapped in this nice bamboo thing, and this is exactly, what I'm going to use to make the notebook along with some paper, of course.

Also I kind of understand that most of you, people, probably won't be able to get exactly the same bamboo thing in your possesion. But there's a lot of different mats and coasters of simlar type, you can buy almost anywhere, so there's no reason to panic... or hate me.

Step 2:

So, before turning this candle wrap (?) into the cover for our notebook, it needs to be cleaned a bit. It, probably, is not very visible on the photo but, as you can imagine, there's some wax stuck to the back surface, and it can stain pages later.

To remove the wax I'm using hot iron and a paper tissue. Pieces of aluminium foil are for protecting the iron. When heat and preassure are applyed the tissue absorbs the wax.

After repeating the procedure a couple of times with changing the tissue it was cleaned enough. And everything smelled with vanilla.

Step 3:

Of course, every notebook has to have pages... except for those modern electronic ones... they have windows... What a weird wordl we're leaving in!

Anyway... it means that it is time to dig out my collection of peculiar papers. Do you have yours?

Step 4:

But first, to make our lives a bit easyer I recomend to make a template from stiff cardboard for cutting the pages we are looking for.

The size of the template depends on the size of the cover, but it is important make it atleast a couple centimetres longer for the reasons that will become clear later.

Step 5:

With nice and sharp hobby knife we can cut pages using the template directly for. But if, in your case, it results in something not very... accurate, use the template for marking the piece first and than cut using the ruller.

By looking at the template and piece, you're going to cut, against the light you can sometimes gat the rough idea about the piece of design you want to capture.

Some pages I've cut are blank, some are decortive (I shuffled them randomly before next step). This what I wanted for this project. You can go your own way.

Step 6:

When all the pages are cut, stack them neatly and use paper binders to fix them in place.

Step 7:

Take the template we used to cut the pages and fold it to find the centre line. Mark then three points on the line: one in the middle, and two more close to the edges. Poke those holes with an awl.

Step 8:

Now flatten the template and apply it to the stack of pages aligning the edges.

Use template to poke holes through the stack of pages.

Step 9:

In similar way use the template to mark the holes in the cover part. In my case they luckily coinsided with the bamboo plank.

To makr the holes I'm using hand a drill, because awl can split the wood (unles it has ridged profile) and because I have a nice hand drill (it's not very nice).

Step 10:

Now we can sew the block of pages to the cover.

Take some strong thread and suitable neadle.

This is how I did it, and I'm not claming it's an ultimate way for doing this, but it will work.

First pull the neadle through the hole on the side of both: page block and the cover from the inside of the notebook. Leave a "tail" of thread to tye the seam later.

Step 11:

Then, from the back of the coverpull the thread through the hole on the opposite side.

Step 12:

Then from the inside pull the thread through the centre hole.

Step 13:

Make a loop arond the thread on the back and pull the it back through the middle hole, tying all neatly.

Step 14:

Tye two ends of the thread on the inside and cut loose ends.

It's not the most ellegant solution and I had to remake it later (I putted the pages block the wrong way so it was missaligned a little). On the second try it turned out a bit nicer with the knot exactly in the middle, which you're able to see on the further photos.

You can try to tye a bow.

Step 15:

Now, we can bend the pages at the middle.

Step 16:

Here you can see the pages are longer than the cover. Also the pages in the middle of the block are longer than those that have to bend around them.

Exactly for this reason we porpously made the template longer, so that now we trim everything neatly.

In order to do so, align pages and the cower and clamp the edges of the pages with paper binders. Mark the edhe of the cover and use sharp knife and metall ruller to trim the edges. No need to rush or force the cutting, just go through the layers of paper with multiple light passes. Also make sure, you're holding the knife blade perprndicular to the cut surface to get nice and straight cut through the whole thicknes of the paper stack (I had my pages shifted in the result :( ).

Step 17:

You can stop right there, but I decided to make an extra step by trimming the edge pages in some artistic way.

Generally it was a good idea but the failure lied in practice.

Do accomplish this task I decided to use old siviet trimmer used for photografs I bought at a flee market some sunny day. The thing was a bit dull and some types of paper I used were not quiet responsive for such type of treatment, so I ended up having somewhat artisticky chewed up edges.

At some point I decided to swich to those cheap figure-cutting scissors... with pretty much the same result.

So, after all, it kind of worked...

Step 18:

Another extra step I decided to make is to decorate the cover with my wood burning iron.

There was rectangular spot of lighter color on the wood surface, where the sticker was attached once upon a time. So I decided to implement some desing on its place. And... well it is not the most ellegand design ever, but I can live with.

On the photos I'm showing the bits I used. They are pretty standart ones.