How can I reuse or recycle old, used notebooks & jotters?
We’re having a book themed week here on Recycle This: check out our other posts on reusing & recycling books in general, damaged books in particular, and some of our favourite how-tos & handmade crafts to buy using old books.
I’m both a scribbler – both writing & drawings – and a hoarder, which means I have a whole lot of old notebooks, exercise books and jotter containing school/college or work notes, half finished stories and really bad little sketches. I do like flicking through them, remembering different projects & times of my life, but at the same time, I realise that they’re mostly just clutter.
Sometimes I’m good and throw out a bunch of them – removing any clumps of blank pages for use as scrap and, in the case of ones with polypro plastic covers, keep the covers for reuse too (mostly as covers for homemade scrap paper notebooks). Since the ones I’ve had are usually spiral bound or simple stapled notebooks, the used papers can go into recycling, the compost bin or for use as firestarting tinder without any worries about binding glue. But it’s so hard to destroy them. All those hours of work creating the sentences or pictures contained within!
Does anyone have any ideas for reusing or upcycling such notebooks instead of just recycling/burning/composting them? Anyone done anything crafty with kids’ school books to preserve their work?
Do you have a scanner? You could scan the story notes and artwork that make you smile, and save them on the computer. That way you can still refer back to them for nostalgia or for inspiration.
Cut out the art, ect. you like, and use those pages to make a cover for a more permanent notebook or journal? You could get a fair amount onto the front and back and inside of a journal cover. Or cover folders. Anything along those lines that would be useful.
Or cut out all the pages that are important to you, and bind them all together into one memory/inspiration notebook to flip through when the mood hits.
Not a thing wrong with keeping your old work. Are you getting rid of it just because you feel you should? I know clutter takes over-believe me, I know!-but one it’s gone, it’s gone.
Anyway, good luck.
i have made the black plastic fronted ones into chalk boards, which i have put up onto a wall, inserted into a photo frame for the bathroom to write love notes on and used one as a mobile one to advertise events xXx
Old notebooks can be used as art journals. Glue several pages together to make each entry stable. Paint with paper paints and add pictures and emblish.
You can frame them for a nifty art work, or print photographs over them and then frame.