Books made from cardboard. Yeah, the purist bookbinders will cringe. These aren't exactly archival. They are just fun notebooks - not everything needs to last forever.
You see, for a lot of my handmade journals, I use paper from large sketchpads for the pages. Each time I finish with one of these sketchpads, I'm left with the large cardboard sheet from the back. So once I accumulate a stack of them, I cut them up and turn them into these cardboard books. It makes sense to me.
I have found that paste papers look great on these. My paste papers are obviously really basic, nothing fancy, and so I think they suit these books rather well. Making cardboard books gives me an excuse to make paste papers.
These are bound using one of the stitching techniques described by Smith in his book
Sewing Single Sheets. There are folded strips of paste paper used as sewing supports, and sewing creates small Xs along the spine.
My stack of cardboard was almost to the ceiling when I started on these so I have lots of them.
And a few stab-bound notebooks where most of the pages are box tops and side panels so the end that is sewn had a pre-existing crease. This gives all the pages a decent hinge allowing the notebook to open quite well.
You can also use boxes to make mailers, i.e. sturdy envelopes. This is particularly useful for people like me who sell stuff online and always have to find/buy shipping materials. If you want to see how it's easily done, there is a quick tutorial for making a granola box mailer on the TCET blog.
