Kraftskine: DIY Moleskine Cahier

I recently picked up a few of the Moleskine Cahier notebooks (yes, I'm aware of the linguistic redundancy). These are the thin little Moleskines with brown kraftpaper as their covers. I like the feel of the paper and like doodling on the front and back. As I was writing my phone number on one in case it was lost, I found myself wanting to run the cover through my inkjet printer.

As there was a big stack of notecards sitting next to the printer, I figured I'd give it a shot. The result is a little 3"x5" DIY Moleskine covered in a brown kraftpaper that I'm calling a "Kraftskine". This one is a prototype and I'm going to do some things different the next time, but it's pretty simple to put together.

I took 25 notecards as the base size. That turned out to be a good number of cards to work with. I clamped those cards together with the big binder clips to make sure that one edge was pretty much solid paper. To bind the cards together, I used Gorilla Glue along the edge.

Once that dried, I removed the binder clips and checked to make sure that all of the pages were in tightly. I then moved on to the cover.

I found a pack of paper in the scrapbooking section of Target that included various shades of brown paper, including the matching kraftpaper in 8.5×11 pages that would go through the inkjet.

Since I wasn't sure how thick the book was going to be, I just made up a Photoshop file with a 5" wide band at the top and put the edge of my front cover on the right. I left the back cover blank, planning to just wrap the book and cut off the excess. For future books I'll aim for more of a wraparound graphic.

At any rate, I cut the cover and made sure it all fit dry. I then applied more Gorilla Glue and clamped the cover on with the binder clips to let it dry. The results are in the photos.

For the next one, I think I'm going to use a spray adhesive like Super 77 and glue the cover directly to the outer 2 notecards. That will make for a cleaner cover setup and cut down on the little bit of bleed-through I got on the spine.

Overall, I do like the results and think I'm going to use this method for little reference books, gift books, etc. It's a nice size and I already know the notecards print well on the inkjet as well, so printing the entire book would work fairly well.