My A6 Traveler's Notebook

So, I posted a tutorial on how to make a DIY Traveler’s Notebook. Now I had better talk about my own one.

In the last year or so, I started carrying around a mini sketchbook and a notebook, so that I could draw or write at any time without having to pack especially for it. They are A6 staple bound so that they don’t weigh too much.

Then I learned about Traveler’s Notebooks and realised that they would be perfect for holding my two notebooks together and stopping them tumbling around in my backpack. However… I decided it wasn’t worth spending the money for the barest improvement in convenience.

Imagine my excitement when I realised that just a single rubber band is sufficient to do the same job! It can be used to make two notebooks essentially share a spine and thus stay together as if one book.

If you look up “how to use Traveler’s Notebook bands” and watch some videos, you can apply their explanations to hold together 3 or 4 notebooks as well.

The books don’t hold themselves shut, which is annoying when you have a stack of them. I dealt with this by adding another rubber band around the outside. It was still inconvenient, because I had to find somewhere to put the second band after I took it off. Nevertheless, if you want to save every penny possible, this is the way to get TN functionality.

I decided that I appreciated the benefits of a TN well enough that it would be worth making my own one now. Once I did that there would be no loose rubber bands flying about.

The result

It turned out well! Not the prettiest but it does the job and looks kind of cute.

I like the A6 dimension because there are so many options. At the moment I have a Seawhite sketchbook and a Rymans notebook in there, some of the cheapest stuff you could possibly find. But I can upgrade to e.g. a fancy Midori MD notebook whenever I like. If I want to bind my own sketchbooks, it will be easy to get the right size of paper by cutting some A4 sheets in half.

A6 also doesn’t fit much, so each notebook becomes a snapshot of a smaller period of my life. That, or I can use them for specific purposes. I have a notebook just for my TTRPG notes, and in the future I will probably use one as an ink log and another for language learning vocab. I can swap them in whenever I need to take them out and about.

Unexpected bonus: when I had to take bank notes to the bank recently, I used a strong clip and clipped them inside the cover of one of the notebooks. They felt more secure wrapped in two layers of cover (not to mention more disguised). I’ve also clipped in memorabilia like tickets and flyers which I wanted to stick into my journal later.

I won’t document how I actually use the notebooks in this post, because I am currently having fun experimenting and changing things around. But as a bonus, here is a page from my sketchbook.