Something Personalized: Child's Artist Dream Notebook

My goddaughter doesn't read this blog. Nor do my best friend's twin boys. So this handmade DIY will be a safe surprise. My goddaughter love unicorns. She also, like me, loves to draw. We had a surprise snow day Thursday (yippee), and the roads were more than drivable by 9 a.m. My shopping was much behind, so I headed out to get my gifts.


I was looking for anything artsy with a unicorn on it: no luck. Why I didn't start with DIY is beyond me. I settled for a box of colored pencils -- the biggest box of 50-- and a standard stack of drawing paper. I drove home to play Santa's elf. And that's when I started thinking.

It finally came to me Friday evening around 5:30. The perfect gift for a 7-8-9-year-old: a personalized drawing pad. I'm pretty savvy when it comes to design and fonts. Most of my fonts come from dafont.com or fontsquirrel.com. My friend Erin at LansdowneLife gave me the heads up on them. I designed all of my covers in Pages, since that's what we have on our computer. But you could do this in any document type application.

Materials:
Drawing Paper Pad with a Spiral (any size. I like a heavy card stock cover)
Card Stock (from stash)
Printer with ink (I still haven't bought ink!)
Good Glue Stick (I've had mine for 5 years...I don't know the brand, but use something hefty)
Scissors
Pencil
Computer Application to design with fonts

Step-by-Step:
1. Design your cover using fonts, images, etc. You could even draw it.
2. Save the image as a PDF, and print it at the percentage that you think will best fit the cover of your drawing pad/notebook
3. Print the image on card stock.
4. Trace the image to match the cover of the drawing pad with a pencil. I lined it up under the spiral tabs.
5. Cut your card stock cover.
6. Cover the drawing pad cover with glue, not the card stock like my image suggests.
7. Adhere your card stock.
8. Let it dry--I placed mine under a heavy cake stand to help set it.
9. Gift!

I thought this would also be a great gift for writers and teachers. If I had the time, I would print off favorite quotes by writers to gift to my English teacher friends. I think next year I am going to make covers of my own with my stack of cereal boxes and sheet music paper to make an entirely upcycled notebook.

Happy Christmas!

xo,

katie