Every year I give my kid’s elementary teachers an end of the year gift. Most years, I make a heavy duty quilted tote bag, but there is always that teacher that my daughter had and now my son has, or teacher that I don’t think would want a tote bag so I do something else.
My son has 2 teachers. One fits the first two categories of a) my daughter already had her as a teacher and b) she wouldn’t be interested in a tote bag. This teacher loves to journal, so when my daughter had her, I bought her some journals and made a drawstring bag to put them in. This year, since I now can do basic book-binding, so I got an early start and made her a journal.
I wanted the paper to be special–have a nice feel–so I ordered some “light weight printer safe seed paper” from “flowerseedpaper” on Etsy. The cool thing about this paper is that you can use it then in stead of throwing it away, you can plant it and it should grow flowers!
Mr. Lynx helped me create a collage ruled lined paper template and I ran them through the printer to get lined journaling paper. Most of the time it ran through the printer ok. I alternated between one sheet at a time, to maybe 5 at a time. Sometimes I had to run it with regular printer paper too for the printer to recognize there is paper in the machine. I didn’t have any problems with paper jams or anything.
His teacher’s first name starts with an M, so I brought out my Cricut for the huge project of cutting out a letter M! hah!
Her favorite colors are black and pink, so I got into my cardstock to destash some! I have 4 signatures. Each signature is black cardstock, hot pink, and light pink cardstock and the lined seed paper glued on with a total of 10 pages to write on for a total of 40 jouranling pages. I added a hot pink square to the front page of each signature. I will add some sort of art, but haven’t decided what yet.
I really like this Wikihow Coptic Bind Tutorial to help me start my book binding journey. I have used it with each of the maybe 3-4 books I have bound since I started learning last year.
The binding!
Now, to check this off my to-do list and hang onto it until the end of the school year!
LOL
The coptic binding looks great! I love coptic stitch because it lets the journal lay open flat and I think it looks really nice. 
