Holiday Books (journals, diaries, whatever)

A little while back I splurged on a little book binder and went to work turning old books into notebooks, journals, doodlebooks which I have been listing over in my Etsy shop.

It is THE perfect way to combine my love of old books with my enduring stationary obsession. Love them.

The ones shown here are filled with fairly lightweight blank paper and although I've been experimenting with heavier, higher quality papers I actually find the lighter weight paper to be really quite a good fit for these (in my humble opinion), surprisingly.
The thicker/heavier paper of a higher quality means you fit less pages into each book.
I'm still experimenting and test-running, it's quite interesting putting these together.

For now though, it's school holidays here, with the kids home for two weeks so I decided I would make Ruby her own little spiral bound book to fill during the holidays. She loves to draw and write and scribble, loves pencils and paper, so I thought this would be great for her, and she loves it.

I used a pretty old book which was in very un-loved shape with biro marks on the cover. It was otherwise pretty much at the end of its' lovely life.
I filled it with an absolute mish-mash of paper goods.
Bits of scrapbooking paper, cardstock scraps,

one of these cool colour-it-in type maps (which I found on Etsy)

airmail envelopes, vintage postcards, anything at all. It's quite rough as you can see above. I punched the holes quite late last night, I was pretty tired..............on some pieces I hadn't got the holes quite right so I just chopped off the bits of pages that didn't fit. Yeah. I was pretty tired.

 I also put in some stories which have come from other books I've turned into journals. They're short but complete stories, being just a few pages long, so perfect for this.
And as soon as Clary saw Rubys' book he had to have one too.
I kept his much the same as Rubys'.

More envelopes, cardstock, vintage postcards to scribble on, he had a map in his also although it can't be seen in these pictures.

A story for Clary also, and he insisted on some acetate sheet music, just like Rubys'.
For both of these books I've put an assortment of stuff in the first half and then pretty much just plain paper in the second half (maybe the odd thing mixed in here and there, but pretty well just plain), for them to draw, write, scribble or whatever takes their fancy.

Not obvious in this picture, but he was happy with his book :)

I can't wait to see what they do with their books.

What are you up to on the holidays?