Notepad

First I have to say that this idea came from an awesome blogger at InfarrantlyCreative.net. Ever since I have been saving every box from snacks to pastas and in this case, beer. These notepads are awesomely creative and have the potential for ultimate personalization at a very low price!

What You Need:

Product box

Paper

Mod Podge

Paper Slicer

Paint stir sticks

Two clothes pins or another form of clamp

Pencil

Paint brush

When doing these notepads, always know your paper size FIRST! It's so much easier to size the cover to the paper than working the other way around. For paper you can use index cards, scrap paper or printer paper cut to size. Your only limit is your imagination.

I took an unnecessary step in making this one. I designed my paper in Photoshop and printed it out and cut it to size. You see (above) the design is monogrammed with my last name embedded in the letter. I printed out 10 sheets of this which gave me 40 sheets in my notepad.

Before I printed this out I marked where I was suppose to cut but they were still off by a few millimeters even with exact measurements. So if you're OCD like me.. plan for this. It isn't too hard getting them even this way, but it's enough to drive me crazy... 

Next step is to trim down the box you want to use. You can use cereal boxes, snack boxes, pancake mix boxes, anything. Open your pantry and take a look at everything in there, you'll find something to use. You could always use it as an excuse to by a giant box of Goldfish like I did :) To trim the box to the right size, just mark it by tracing the paper you have already cut to size. You will need to cut two pieces. One for the front and one for the back.

Now for the important part. Stack all the paper along with the front and back of the notepad. When you are bouncing the stack of paper against the table in effort to neatly stack it, make sure that the top of the notepad is on the bottom. It's IMPERATIVE to have those pages lined up evenly or the notepad will fall apart. Once stacked, sandwich the notepad between the two paint sticks as shown in the picture above. Clamp them together with the two clothes pins. And paint a layer of Mod Podge onto the top of the notepad. Let it dry and repeat 2 or 3 more times.

You may need an alternate clamp if you have more paper. Those black paper clamps found in most offices work great and come in a variety of sizes.

Once it's dry, remove the hardware and you're ready to rock your new notepad! I love this craft. It's awesome and has sooo much potential to be amazing. You can do these for gifts or baby showers, anything. A truly a versatile art form.

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