So good to see you’ve popped along to the blog today! I have a great post showcasing how easy it is to create a simple wire-bound notebook with the Cinch machine. If you are unfamiliar with the Cinch machine, or want to know more, check out this post HERE. I have made a few different notebooks over the last few months and each of them are fun to make. Hopefully you will find this one just as fun! I have kept it simple with the design on the covers as I wanted to purely focus on how to make a wire-bound notebook. So what are you waiting for? Let’s get started!
Materials required to make a wire-bound notebook:
- Cinch machine
- Metal wire comb
- Chipboard
- Decorative paper
- PVA glue
- Normal plain paper
- Paper trimmer
- Ruler and pencil
- Craft knife and Cutting mat
Wire-bound notebook Project details
To start making your wire-bound notebook you need to decide on the size of the book you wish to create. The notebook I’ve made in the photos measures at 5″ 3/4 X 7″ 3/4. This is large enough to take half an A4 piece of paper. When you have decided on the size of you notebook, cut this out of your chipboard making sure you cut two pieces – one for the front cover and one for the back.
Before I began punching, I decorated the covers.
Cut your decorative paper down, so they are 1 inch wide all around. Next, apply PVA glue to the surface of the front of the cover and the back of the paper. Following this, place the cover on-top of the paper and use an old bank card to smooth out any bubbles.
If you are happy with the front of the cover, turn this over. To get nice crisp corners, I cut a small notch out of the paper at each corner. Once you have done this, apply a little more glue to the paper, and fold the edges over to adhere down onto the cover. If needed, use your old bank card to help smooth the edges for a crisp look.
I covered the inside of my front cover card with more decorative paper. Trim down a matching or corresponding paper to an “1/8 smaller than the cover. Next use PVA glue to adhere this down. Once you are happy with the front cover, you can repeat this for the back cover.
For the paper inserts inside, I took a number of normal plain paper and trimmed this down in half.
Now, you should have all your pieces to punch and bind to make the notebook.
How to punch and bind:
To start punching, make sure all your knobs are pushed in to punch. If you are are unsure, please refer to this post HERE. I was able to punch several of the paper pieces at once. However, I stuck to punching the chipboard covers individually due to their thickness. I needed to punch additional 3 holes for the length of this notebook. To do this, once all 12 wholes were punched, I pulled out the ruler guide for more space. Then pulled the paper pack down, and inserted the white lever into the last whole. This helps keep the paper in place when punching addition wholes. To make sure I didn’t have a whole half punch on the edge of the paper, I pulled knob 4 out. This meant only the first 3 wholes punch through the remainder of my papers.
With all my punching complete, I placed the wire comb over the bind holder posts and thread all the covers and paper on to the wire. It is important that these are put in the right order: Your back cover and front cover with outsides together, followed by your paper. This is to ensure the wire seal is inside the book.
You should now be ready to cinch! Place your book wire comb up against the back of the cinch machine with the wire opening touching the back. Take note of the size of your wire comb; I used a “3/4 wire and turned the dial to match this. It is important to adjust this, as if the setting is on too high a number it will not close the wire completely. When in the correct position and the dial adjusted pull the large lever down to cinch the wire.
One piece of advise I can give when it comes to binding, is to make sure the opening of the wire is up against the back of the machine. If you have this slightly misaligned it can misshapen when binding. As the length of my book was slightly longer than the binding area, I had to bind in two stages. The first stage went well, but as you can see from the photo above the second didn’t. This was because I hadn’t paid attention when I put the wire back in and hadn’t aligned the opening correctly, given a bent shape.
If you want to learn more on making handmade notebooks using the Cinch machine, Scrapbook.com has a created a great step by step feature, click HERE to head there. **
Hopefully this post has shown you how easy it is to make a quick and simple wire-bound notebook. Once you have mastered this, you can then go to town on decorating and embellishing your notebooks.
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Till next time,
*this post was NOT sponsored, requested, or paid for; I have written it because I wanted to. The information provided is based on my own personal experience. I am not an expert and I do not work for these companies.
**I was not paid or sponsored to link to this post. However, I was contacted asking if I would be interested in posting this link but it was at my discretion if I wanted to do this. I have included the link as I believe this is a great resource my viewers could use and wanted to share it with you all.
