ScavengerCraft

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering what to do with that gorgeous leather-bound notebook once it’s full, this is for you.

Disclaimer: This is NOT a bookbinding how to! I had no idea what I was doing, I’m just glad it worked. This project exists because I refused to let something beautiful be the single-use product it was designed to be, and I just hope someone out there finds inspiration from this.

Welcome to the first documented ScavengerCraft project! Not the project I was planning to start with, but so it goes. This was an entirely spontaneous “I have no idea what I’m doing” project fueled by sheer audacity and maybe one episode on bookbinding I saw on How It’s Made some months ago. It had no right to go as well as it did, and I’m very pleased with the end result.

I, like many, have an unfortunate habit of collecting pretty journals only to feel like nothing is good enough to write in them. When I first bought this journal I got stuck in the trap of trying to find the perfect use for it. I was finally able to escape the trap by considering something that felt vaguely blasphemous: Fill it up, then strip the cover and reuse it.

Well, I finally filled the journal. Time to commit crafting crimes and give it new life!

The tooled leather cover peeled off quite readily from the core notebook, leaving me with a floppy shell that wasn’t going to anybody any good. I needed to figure out how to make it reusable long-term. Enter paper, glue, and FAFO.

Thicker craft paper for structural support, thinner decorative paper I’ve been stashing for an embarrassing amount of time, some cheap-ass spray glue, and this leather cover can now be used to dress up future notebooks. I even managed to save the leather bookmark strip; it came right off the original notebook and readily stuck to the new one.

So that’s that. Resisting overconsumption one scavenged journal at a time.