Crafting 37 personalised handmade notebooks

Making one bespoke notebook for someone is always exciting, but being asked to make 37 of them for an entire team is a little bit overwhelming!

Always up for a challenge, though, I did not hesitate to accept the commission and spent a very happy couple of months working with the team’s project manager to choose paper, ribbon, book cloth and notebook style to match each team member. Everyone was asked to share their favourite colour and we went from there. A spreadsheet was involved!

It took a fair few trips to my favourite paper shop – Shepherds in London – with options ranging from beautiful Angie Lewin nature-based designs (the recipient later asked me how I knew they loved artichokes, to which the reply was: ‘lucky guess!’), to gorgeous handmade Japanese katazome-shi paper that is now very rare because the paper maker has closed. I was also lucky enough to pick up some original marbled papers made by Ann Muir after Shepherds inherited her archive.

I learnt A LOT during this commission, about process, materials and myself. The old adage about doing 10,000 hours of something is so true (even if the figure itself is a bit arbitrary) and I learnt so many ways to mess up and – crucially – how to fix it. With printmaking and bookbinding there is inherent risk of it something going wrong at every stage. Weirdly, it’s one of the things that I love most about both practices, and sometimes there’s nothing for it but to start from scratch. However, every mistake was genuinely an opportunity to improve the next book I made.

It was a huge undertaking, but also an absolute pleasure to create something individual for so many people. My hope is their owners are all now using them – as beautiful as they are, notebooks are still utilitarian objects. It’s one of the reasons why I love making them so much.