Five Yellow Notebooks

Five yellow notebooks all with coptic stitching (one almost done well), book board covered in yellow, red inserts for a touch of flair and endpapers made of photos I took from around the neighborhood. A very big neighborhood. Pictures of cherry blossoms on the inside front cover. And a temple in sepia on the inside back cover. Unless you turn the notebook over, in which case they are the opposite.

What did we learn from all of this? I learned how to do coptic binding better and tighter. The whole purpose behind making five (five green notebooks below and five yellow ones now) is Practice. Practice. And more practice. Each one seems to be getting a little better each time (except the one where I ripped the hole too wide near the edge and screwed it entirely. Oh, well, we learn and live.)

Ready for one more picture?

Here is in the inside of the back cover. This is a temple in Kanazawa at dusk, although this is a sepia and slightly Photoshopped for color adjustment. A famous writer lived here as a child and it's half a temple and half a museum of his life.

Good fun in making all five notebooks. The last one is the one with the funky cover which you can barely see in the top photo. All the others have nothing on the cover except yellow.

Five notebooks - side

Five notebooks - side
Originally uploaded by Tedorigawa

Completed May 31, 2008.
They are a great size for jacket pockets - now that summer is raising it's ugly head and no one will be wearing Jackets! Of course, I learned a few things: alignment is important, for example. And book cloth makes a better cover than paper. And you should make sure you have enough material to make five books before you set out to make five books. (Just a rule of thumb, of course, no need to be fanatical about it.) And I've confirmed my idea that, while blank notebooks are fine, some content would be nice.

My next project, nearly complete, is another set of five blank notebooks (see What I've Learned, above, to see that I haven't really learned it at all.) but with a difference! The end papers are photos of my fair city: the front is an array of cherry trees in full bloom and the back is the residence of an author who made good nationally.

I shall upload more photos of this project: Five Green Notebooks, in the near future. And, when complete, the five other notebooks.