Create: A Book or Two

One of my favorite new crafts is making books.  If you have been following this blog long, you may know that by now!  :)  You may also know that I am a terrible hoarder when it comes to paper.  Some day I will make it to the hardware store and get screen so I can make my own.  Then it will all be worth saving when I make it into new paper, mwahaha... ahem. 

One of the easiest ways to reuse paper, or envelopes, that have only been printed on one side is to cut them up and staple them together.  Tadaa, you have a notepad.  But one of the downsides is that you have to work around the staple.  I make my notepads at work kind of thick so I don't have so many laying around.  The staple always annoys me.  I have to bend the pages around it, hold it open, and then it won't lay flat when I'm done with it. 

I decided to take my elmer's glue to work and make my own, easy notepads.

It could be the (second) easiest way to make a notepad, but it does take some time.  You have to line up the pages, clip them together, brush on the glue, wait for it to dry, add more glue, wait, more glue, wait, etc, up until you get the nice binding that you want.  I only used a few layers on these notebooks but made it pretty thick each time. 

I use binder clips to hold them together and add a piece of cardboard (the thicker the better) along the edge to be glued.  Keep the cardboard back from the edge just a bit or it will become glued to the pad and you may loose a few pages when you take it off. 

You could cut a piece to size and glue it to the notepad as a backing, if you wanted to.

I'm off to enjoy my new, no staple, notepad.  Have a great weekend!