DIY 2014 Diary With Free Printable

I’m happy to report that I’ve recently graduated from Damask Love’s Bookbinding University! I’m completely in love with Amber’s blog and when I read her posts on step by step DIY bookbinding you would not believe how excited I was! Breaking it down, I’m obsessed with books. My dream home will (WILL because it’s gonna happen) have a library in it, like the one in Candleshoe if you’ve seen it (awesome film) or maybe Bedknobs and Broomsticks. It will definitely have the sliding ladders anyway. I have boxes and boxes of books and a huge pile of notebooks which date back at least 10 years and I still haven’t written in because I haven’t yet found a perfect enough subject to ruin one by writing in it! This new skill doesn’t bode well for free space in my house as I’m expecting the notebook pile to grow significantly in the coming weeks and months.

I’m not going to write a bookbinding tutorial because Amber’s much more of an expert than me and her videos are easy to follow. (Yes I did buy the We R Memory Keepers Magnetic Cutting Mat after watching her tutorials!). I’ve made a little animation of my process – I am having a bit of a problem with trimming the pages, the craft knife drags quite a lot so I think I’m going to buy a proper paper trimmer/guillotine.

As always, my downfall is that I can’t just try something simple for my first attempt, so I made myself a 2014 diary. I combined 4 sheets of A4 into a signature and the diary has four signatures. Let me tell you that trying to get into a format that would print correctly double sided sounds simple but it really isn’t! In the end I had a spreadsheet of which way up each section had to be and which page it should be on! I know that technically it should be portrait so that it’s the right way up when you open the book but I make a lot of notes and I wanted extra space. On the upside, now it’s finished I love it and, as I went through such trials getting it to work, I wanted to share it with you to download and print if you’re in the market for a DIY 2014 diary too! Download the 2014 Dairy Printable here.

I made a general diary and also a blog diary to try and be better organised and post more frequently and so far it’s working! I used Martha Stewart Home Office Adhesive Metal Bookplates (2.7cm x 5.4cm) that I got from Staples to the covers and hand stamped the year onto a rectangle of paper. I’m still pretty new to stamping so may swap the labels out later in the year for something a little bit more sophisticated although I’ve always been a fan of a typewriter-esqe font.

I covered my diaries with 56 x 76cm paper sheets from Hobbycraft, they only had one roll of the rose print one, if they’d had 100 rolls I may have bought all of it as it’s so pretty, I chose the black flocked paper for the other as I think they complement each other nicely. You’d also get away with using wallpaper which, if you’re thrifty, you can tear off as a sample in DIY stores for free! shhhhh…

For a little more DIY flair, I used the Sizzix Big Shot that I got for Christmas to create tabs to seperate the months inside – I made sure the cover stretched far enough to accomodate the tabs without them popping out the side.

I made the first diary over Christmas and have just finished the second and I still get a rush of pride when I look at the like “I made an actual book!” and I can only get better with practice. I’m already compiling a list of people getting a notebook as a gift this year!

Here are some more shots of the finished articles: