Duct Tape Notebooks

I've always been fascinated by book-making.  I've bought several instructional books, and have purchased necessary tools like awls and waxed linen and special glue.  But I always get spooked by the complexity of the process, and have yet to tackle book-making with hand-stitched bindings.

But book-making from food packaging with a duct tape binding?  When I first heard about it, that sounded like something I could handle!

One of the currently-open swaps on Karen's Mail Me Some Art blog is a duct tape journal swap.  She provides a link to a video by Diana Trout, demonstrating her method for creating duct tape notebooks.  I encourage you to go watch it; in less than six minutes you will discover a fun new project that I know you will want to try immediately!

I'll leave Diana to show you the process, but I'll talk you through the basics of what I did.

First, I had to access my stash of old food packaging.  C'mon!  Don't you save boxes from your cereal, tea, coffee filters, and dessert bars?  Surely, it's not just me!  I kept a lot of these, thinking that I would make books with them using my Cinch binding machine.  Their casual, ephemeral nature suits the duct tape binding project even better!

I created my front and back book covers by cutting the front and back of the food packaging to create two rectangles of cardboard.  I then laid these down on a strip of duct tape, which I wrapped around them to create a spine.  (This makes perfect sense from the six-minute video!)

Then--the fun part--I selected the papers I wanted to put into my books.  I used quite a variety--road maps, cookbook pages, magazine photos, foreign text pages, phone book pages, graph paper, children's book illustrations, envelopes (cut the flap in the middle, like I do for my airmail envelope notebooks, and you end up with two little pockets in your journal!), art book illustrations, barn maps (I have a whole book of them!), napkins, and more.

For the first book I created, I cut most of the papers to the same size as the covers.  For the second two books, I just put in papers no matter what their sizes, so the books have lots of different layers to flip through. 

Every selected paper gets folded in half and tucked between the front and back covers.  They are then secured by wrapping a rubber band around the middle.

Simple as that, you have a duct tape notebook!

I first sat down to this project Saturday night at 10:30 pm, and by 11 o'clock I had created covers for three books and finished one whole book altogether.  On Sunday morning, I had ten minutes before church, so I sat down and finished the second book.  The third book came together later that afternoon.  It's a super-quickie project, people--just like I like 'em!

Go right now and check out Diana's video, and let me know when you give one of these (or ten!) a try!  And if you finish one before October 27, consider participating in Karen's swap!

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