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Notebooks and leather

This doesnt really have anything to do with the past posts on this blog, but has still been a large event/ change in my life. And since I think youre supposed to talk about your life in your blog, I think I should make this post. Hopefully it will also be helpful anyways.

This post is about leather and notebooks.

Carrying around a notebook has changed my life to a somewhat significant extent. It started with this video, A Notebook to Save You from Infinite Scrolling & Boredom. Then I bought a 3 pack of mini composition notebook after watching this video, This pocket notebook is (slowly) replacing my phone. After using it very haphazardly for a while and using it intensely on and off, the last few months I started really using my pocket notebook often.

I carried it in my front pocket or backpack everywhere. And I would write all my daydreams, opinions, revelations, ideas I heard, things and stories my parents told me, all in this notebook. AT fist I did it because it felt novel. But it actually started to reaveal its true usefulness because of one fact.

I have an awful memory.

So many things I want to remember pass by me everyday. And yeah, before I could just write them in my notes app. But they would sit and rot there, never being checked. Erased from existence once I changed phones. Same thing with taking a screenshot or photo. My photos app was just a rotting graveyard.

The nice thing about carrying a notebook, it only has one purpose. To write things without distraction. And to read those things later on without distraction. It was genuinely a savior to me- always full of ideas, but cursed with an awful memory.

Strong opinions and arguments that I thought were very integral to my person, but kept swimming and half backed in the back of my head, could actually become concrete.

Im the type of person who, admitting this shamefully, always wanted to make a youtube channel or podcast. I have so many ideas, opinions, and activities come up that I wanted to share, only to have them disappear like mist once something else came up. At the end of the day, I knew if I actually tried it I would have nothing interesting to talk about.

So once I took a coding class, watched some videos about the old/ indie web, I thought maybe I could make a blog. And after using my notebook for awhile, I had actually collected ideas I cared about. As you use the notebooks and have it in your mind as the place where ideas go, you start to think about things to put in it. So its a nice little feedback loop to get you thinking and think more.

So, if youre the daydreamer, idea guy, "I have a novel I want to write" person, poetry person, quote person, planning person, ect. A pocket notebook is for you.

Additionally for me, as I learned and read more to write more, I noticed patterns in what I was interested in and cared about. As I learned more about these things, I started to use more notebooks to organize and store the important things. Park notes, mentioned in the first link, influenced me greatly to do that.

So if you like the pocket notebook and want to organize and expand whatever you write in there, more notebooks are for you.

Now youve probably thought "where does the leather part come in" at least once by now.

Well, as I carried that pocket notebook, it got wore DOWN. I carried it everywhere and treated it poor enough to the point that I started falling apart and tearing. And by absolute chance, I had gone to hobby lobby and saw a 5$ bag of leather scraps. The dots connected in my head and I just went for it. No background knowledge, just a blind attempt. Leather scraps, needles, and waxed cord. The first cover, the black one at the bottom, looked ugly as shit. But it protected my notebook very well. I liked the feel of it, and it was much easier to make than I previously anticipated.

So I want to show you how to make a leather cover for your pocket and larger size notebooks. Im urging you now v ery strongly to start carrying a pocket notebook for whatever. And Ill show you how to make a cover to go along with it. I made a refillable pocket notebook cover, and trifold A5 notebook cover. This post is long as hell already, so those tutorials will be separate posts. But since this notebook helped me so much and leather covers for notebooks are so insanely expensive, I want to show you how to do all this yourself.

> Here are all the covers

> The left is the new cover and the right is the old cover

> The notebooks slide into flaps on the inside of the covers. Ill cover all this in the tutorials.