Personality Check

Over at Twitter today, me, LaTtEX and rivengodwind chatted a bit about dead-tree notebooks.  At one point, LaTtEX mentioned that being scalable is the bane of spiral notebooks. By scalable I mean you can just keep on adding or removing paper to the notebook itself. While there are binders that allow you to do that, spiral notebooks still hold a certain charm since they are flexible.

I’ve had a lot of spiral notebooks over the years and I end up not filling them up at all. Worse, there are times when the notebook couldn’t hold enough of my thoughts and ideas that I have to resort to inserting extra sheets using tape. But a trip to Fully Booked bookstore gave me an idea. There was a notebook there that was refillable and yet still retained that “flexible” charm. It used two plastic rings instead to hold all the sheets together. I decided to do the same and recycle the notebooks that I had at home.

First, I needed the rings. I bought a pack of plastic stripes from Japan Home (PhP 88.00).

Here’s a close-up of the plastic stripe in case you don’t know what it looks like.

Then I proceeded to remove the spiral binding from my notebooks.

I found around three or four barely filled notebooks. Removed all their wire spiral binding and gathered up all the pages. Then I took two plastic stripes and threaded each one to a hole.

Here’s a close up on what it looks like after threading and locking.

And finally, here’s what my “new” notebook looks like.

I also have a similar one with 400 sheets! This one’s a tad thinner though.

The nice thing about this is that you can use practically anything for the notebook using this design. If you have the time, you might be able to make a nice journal with a cloth or leather cover. Perhaps instead of the plastic stripes you could use small metal rings or some of the wires you use flower making.  The possibilities are endless!