An Altered Composition Book with Tabs

Yes, I've been on a papercrafting kick lately. I've never outgrown my childhood love of paper, and I suspect I never will. So let me share my latest variation on the composition-notebook-turned-pretty-journal: tabbed sections.

Front cover

I decided to make myself a pretty notebook, and I chose to use a graph-lined composition notebook. I found this one at a thrift store for $0.40. Someone had used three pages out of it, but it was a very nice quality, so I just carefully removed the used pages and continued on.

After doing several tabbed notebooks, I came up with a formula. What can I say? I like to reduce things to formulas and patterns. It's just the way my mind works. It also frees me to narrow my creative focus to the little details that make the difference for me.

So I started out with three sheets of floral paper, two sheets of polka dot paper, four sheets of cardstock and a Spellbinders tab die.

These papers came from Hobby Lobby. I don't have a Hobby Lobby store near me, but I like to support them every chance I get. So I stopped in while I was on vacation recently. I couldn't resist these gorgeous papers, especially at $0.25 for a 12x12" sheet!

There are 80 sheets in the composition notebook I used. Since I created four dividers, that means each section has 20 sheets (including the divider page). And since I removed three sheets, I just took those out of the page count of the outermost sections.

I created the front cover (shown above) with one of the sheets of the floral paper, saving the scraps for dividers.

Back cover

 I accented the gorgeous floral with a polka dot paper on the back and wrapped it around to the front. This took most of one sheet, but there were scraps that I saved to use on the divider pages (and for the tabs).

Inside front cover and first divider

This paper doesn't need any more decoration, at least for me. So I simply cut a second sheet of the floral paper to fit inside the front cover and used the excess for part of the first divider page. It gives it a seamless look, and I really like this method. To fill in the rest of the divider page, I used a scrap of the polka dot paper.

A note on the tabs: This paper is lightweight, so the tabs needed some reinforcement. I backed them with cardstock before attaching them to the page, and it worked perfectly.

Second divider

This is the next divider page. I used scraps from the floral pages and filled in with the extra polka dot sheet (as well as polka dot scraps).

Third divider

I accented the pages with some homemade paper lace. I was so excited to find this Martha Stewart lace border punch at a thrift store recently! It was one of my all-time favorites from the last time I was into papercrafting.

Fourth divider

That's the last of the divider pages.

Inside back cover

I used floral paper on the inside of the back cover. I actually did this before the divider pages so I could use up all the scraps of the floral paper on the dividers. It worked well because I didn't have many scraps at all.

And that's it! I really, really love this notebook. I'm currently using it to sketch out my craft ideas. Graph paper comes in so handy for things like that, and I like that I can hang onto all of my ideas in one book to refer back to.