DIY: 4 Tips for Making Pinterest-Worthy Notebooks and Journals
Product Description
4 Tips for Making Notebooks and Journals
Sites like Pinterest and Etsy are inspiring a new generation of Do It Yourself-ers, and many crafters are turning their hobbies into a means of income.
Journaling and sketching are very therapeutic for a lot of people. And while the real treasure is the personal work inside, having a beautiful, high-quality notebook cover does your work justice. If you love to make your own notebooks, journals, diaries, scrapbooks, sketchbooks, or just plain books, then you can create gorgeous DIY journals using a wire binding machine.
A wire binding machine is one of the best methods of binding a book, because the book lays flat without force, and the pages can be folded back onto themselves to keep other pages out of the way.
Here are some simple DIY steps to creating a professional looking book to sell or use on your own:
- First you need to know what kind of book you’re going to make. How large do you want the book to be? What kind of material will it hold? For journaling, simple printer or specialty paper will do, but for scrapbooking, you will want larger sized pieces of heavy paper or cardstock that can hold up to the photographs that will be put inside of it.
- What orientation do you want the pages to be? Portrait or landscape? Vertical or horizontal? Or are your pages perfectly square? You may want to change the orientation of your pages depending on the type of book you’re making. Wide, broad pages are more suitable for scrapbooks, but narrow, vertical pages can be great for small notebooks. You can also play with which side you want the book bindings to be on. Just be sure that your pages are set up well to accommodate an automatic paper punching machine. If there are designs on the pages, you may want to rethink how you want to set the bindings up.
- How many pages will the book be? For a blank book, it’s hard to make that decision. But as the bookmaker, you need to know what size coils to buy and which setting to put the coil binding machine on. If this isn’t taken into account, the binding either won’t fit or will be too heavy for the book, causing friction. Using punch tools with near-polished flanks and a quarter degree back taper reduces the friction, increasing the life of the punch tool as well as the paper it punches.
- After the heavy planning comes the more fun things. What kind of colors do you want on the book? Do you want an envelope pocket in the front or back to hold bookmarks, mementos, or other pieces of paper? As the creator, you can do whatever you want!
In order to craft the perfect custom notebooks, you’ll need a high-quality wire binding machine. Spiel Associates, Inc. has book binding equipment to accommodated DIY books of all sizes.
Testimonials
The Coilmaster Jr. is very easy to set up and reliable as can be. We train temps to run the machine and they do a great job. We save 60 – 70% on plastic coil costs by making our own coil.
Their training was awesome. Now the girls that were trained are training others. We are coil binding 18″ long books. The Coilmaster is truly great!!!
I purchased my first Digibinder in 2007. I get buried once a year by Town Reports so I bought another one. Once a year I drive one of them down to Spiel for preventative maintenance. These things last forever.
The Wiremaster Pro is amazing. It does the work of three wire binders with half the labor. We love it.
We’ve been doing plastic coil binding for 30 years but David Spiel really took us back to school. He is the first vendor ever to teach us about pitch, and filament gauge, hole shape and diameters. The Coilmaster Jr. Plus rocks!
We had never done coil binding before we purchased The Sterling Digipunchmaster and The Coilmaster Jr. Plus. We bound 2,500 on our first day of production. Since we purchased them during the pandemic, we received no installation or training, just great installation and training videos.
I can’t say enough good about the people at this company. They are excellent to work with. I like the equipment they sell too.
I can’t say enough good about the people at this company. They are excellent to work with. I like the equipment they sell too.
What we like is the ease of operation and set up. The machine is what I call an open system, a machine where it is easy to see how it operates and easy to locate all the functions.
We’re getting 650 books per hour on The Coilmaster and we’re loving it. We have 250,000 books to do in the next two months and instead of dreading this job like we used to, we now say: Bring it on.
In-line coil forming and inserting is the most important feature for us on the Coilmaster. Buying and waiting for plastic coil proved to be a hardship. We can now optimize our production time, turning around multiple jobs more quickly.
We tried another automatic coil machine and it failed to perform. We bought a Coilmaster System and after it validated our decision, we bought two more systems. This machine gave us the production speeds we were looking for.
