Miniature pencils and composition notebooks.
So, you’ve got your pencils made, its time to make a composition notebook to go with them. The composition notebook is an equally simple project. To start out, place two sheets of copy paper, neatly lined up on top of one another, on a cutting board and cut into 1″ strips. Gather the strips into a pile, with all the long edges on one side aligned as closely as possible. Use a couple of binder clips to keep the layers all together, and spread a layer of glue along that edge, taking care to get glue on every sheet in the stack. When the glue has dried completely, take the clips off and cut the strip of stacked paper into ‘book’ lengths, I cut them each 1 1/4″ long.
The strips for notebook blanks being glued together.
The composition print covers were made by scanning the pattern from a full-size notebook and printing it out at a greatly reduced size. Again, you don’t really want a copy that is exactly 1/12 scale because the white areas will begin to fill in, so reduce it until it looks good to you. Printing one copy at about 25% will yield enough of the print in a convincing scale to cover one notebook. If you want to cover a number of books, make several copies and piece them together to make a larger sheet and then make copies of that.
Cut your printed cover to the height of the book, in this case 1 1/4″, and wrap it around the book blank, creasing it around the spine, then remove it. Apply glue along the spine and replace the cover on the book. When the glue has dried, you can trim the edges of the cover with scissors or an X-acto knife. Use a black sharpie to create the black spine, coloring along the spine and a narrow border on the front and back next to the spine.
Your mini students are now ready for mini school!
