Embellished Kraft Notebooks

Hello everyone! This week's craft is some adorable embellished kraft notebooks. Kraft paper is brown toned paper that looks a bit like thin cardboard. I first of all want to say that this craft is HEAVILY inspired by a video from one of my favorite crafty Youtubers, LaurDIY. She gave me the inspiration for the base of this project and then I took her idea and went a little farther with it. Here is the link to the Youtube video where she makes some similar kraft notebooks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zVYoy51TvA

I just bought a pack of 6 kraft notebooks on Amazon. I could choose whether I wanted the inside pages to be blank or have lines so I went with lined pages.

The idea that I got from LaurDIY was to poke holes into the covers of the notebooks and string some embroidery thread through the holes to creat different designs. You can use any color of embroidery thread you want for this. I just went into my large stash of thread I have from years of friendship bracelet phases. I also had some cute stickers I had gotten (some butterflies, llamas and birds) so I tried to create designs with the embroidery thread that worked well with the stickers. The first step to creating the thread designs was to trace out the size of the notebook cover on printer paper. Then I cut this rectangle out and used it as the base for my design templates. For the first two notebooks, I just wanted a diamond pattern with a space in the middle for a sticker, so I marked holes in appropriate spots on my template.

Then I took my template and laid it over the cover of the notebook. You should probably put something in between the cover of the notebook and the first few pages so that you don't poke holes all the way into your pages. I used a long, thicker needle to poke holes through my template into the cover of the notebook itself. After this was done, I chose what colors of thread I wanted to use and started threading them through with the needle. I taped the loose ends of the thread to the inside of the front cover. For the notebooks I wanted to use the llama stickers with, I planned a zig-zag design to kind of look like a hill that the llamas could be climbing up.

For the final two notebooks, I thought it would be cute to make some tree branch and leaf designs for the bird stickers to be resting on.

Once I got all of the thread designs done, I added the stickers that I wanted to each notebook cover (you will be able to see the stickers when I show you the final products). I knew that I wanted to cover up the taped thread that was on the inside of the notebook covers and my crafty mother luckily had some sheets of kraft paper that we could cut the size of the cover. Before I stuck this paper on the inside of the cover to cover up the loose ends, I added another touch to these notebooks. My mother made a great suggestion: add a piece of ribbon to be used as a page marker like you often see in fancy notebooks. To do this, I found matching ribbon and cut a piece about 1 1/2 times the length of the notebook cover. This allowed enough length for the ribbon to be able to be glued to the inner cover and for it to hang between the pages.

I also added a bead to the end of each page marker ribbon and used a lighter to burn the edges of the ribbon so that it wouldn't fray. Because most crafting ribbon is made of some kind of synthetic stuff, applying a gentle flame to the end very quickly kind of "caramelizes" the ribbon end and seals it up so it doesnt fray. That was a terrible description of he science behind all this, but you hopefully get my point.  Once the ribbon was secured to the inside of the cover, I then added the piece of kraft paper to cover up the thread end and make the notebook look seamless. I used a combination of strong, double-sided crafting tape on the edges and liquid glue in the center of the page to make sure this piece of paper stuck really well over the ribbon and thread.

And then the notebooks were done! Here are the final products, complete with their stickers and page markers.

What do you guys think! I love how these turned out and really appreciate LaurDIY and my mother giving me the inspiration to get them just how I wanted!

 - Rebecca