Repurposed envelopes
Or: how to turn discarded envelopes and unsolicited mail into useful notebooks!
These are mostly made with the envelopes and (sometimes) the back side of the letters, when they are blank (or just printed in a light enough shade of ink). Which ends up generating some interesting effects, with different paper colours and grades and the envelopes' patterns showing on the side of the notebook, and decontextualised content such as the envelope window, a postmark or maybe even my own name and address showing up in the middle of two pages.
They are excellent for non-serious note taking. You don't worry about ruining an expensive brand new stylish notebook with "not good enough" content. After all, this is just a step away from recycling. To-do lists, shopping lists, telephone numbers... the sort of things that generally get noted down and disposed of once they are done. Well, now I won't have lots of little pieces of paper cluttering my table: they are all grouped together in a hand-made notebook!
Yes, I made sure that "recycle" label was on the front of the notebook. It seemed appropriate!
A bit about the process...
Here are a couple of images showing the 'before' and the tools. All is pretty cheaply done, using readily available materials in any household: cheap thread and needles, wood pegs, scissors, and a cutter.
A word of warning before you attempt to replicate this, though: it can get dangerous! I broke two needles because evidently those flimsy pieces of metal weren't ready for the heavy duty requirements of paper binding. When a needle breaks in the middle, it's highly possible that one of your finger tips gets harmed. Luckily this didn't happen to me--but I was quite close to it! Another possibility is that you pinch your fingers with the scissors. This did happen and it's not nice!
No worries though, my hands are still intact, albeit a little bit hurt :-) Just be careful and use a good pair of strong scissors.
NOTE: I also made fun of email spam almost a year ago, in my "Unsolicited letters in the 1800s" project.
