Bags of Love A5 Custom Notebook

One of my favorite emails to get is when a company approaches me out of the blue and offers me a product for review. Part of me worries for them a little bit, because I have high office supply standards, and I’ll feel bad if it turns out I hate whatever they so nicely offered me, or if it has some major terrible flaw (like a notebook with terrible paper (this has happened before, I contacted the company about it, that review remains in limbo)). LUCKILY FOR EVERYONE, THIS WAS NOT THE CASE HERE! So I can thank Bags of Love for providing this sample without any reservation.

Front, featuring a sunrise from my bedroom window. Back, featuring a sunset in Morocco. Both sides featuring reflection self-portrait shadows!

The way this company works is they take photos you upload to the site and make personalized gifts—in this case, a notebook. This only narrowly avoided being a notebook of my cat; the pictures I had taken with my real camera of a sunrise out my bedroom window and a sunset in Morocco were better quality than a thousand iPhone cat pictures.

The notebook is a glossy soft cover. It looks beautiful and you can touch it all you want. The photographs I used turned out wonderfully, with solid blacks and rich colors, just as they looked on my computer screen, and the design/upload interface on the website was easy to use.

The downside to it being a soft cover though is I just know these corners are going to get dinged up, and the spine will end up creased and lined like any paperback.

Crease damage to top of spine. Typical for paperback books.

Now for the good news. No, the fantastic news. THIS PAPER IS WONDERFUL. I had no idea. I didn’t have the slightest clue going in. I looked at the cream-colored, unlined paper and braced myself for enough feathering to cover an outdated dinosaur model and enough bleedthrough to designate the notebook a crime scene…and got none of it! Not the slightest fuzz!

EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL

Even my broad nibbed Pilot Vanishing Point, which throws down ink like it’s going out of style, it was able to handle with ease. You can somewhat see the shadow of the previous page’s writing, but nothing so bad that it would stop me from using both sides of the page.

Lines crisp and both sides of the page usable

I got the A5 size (8×6″), but they also offer A6 (6×4.5″) notebooks. Says it’s got 150 sides of paper…I don’t feel like counting. I can tell you it is a decent but manageable amount of paper. I don’t like a notebook with too much paper, because then it’s too heavy to carry around in a casual bag. And being unlined, I can use this notebook for writing OR drawing.

A bit thicker than a standard writing utensil

Price-wise, this is definitely a case of getting what you pay for. This is a high-quality custom-cover notebook. Something from, say, CafePress would be cheaper, but have you ever actually ordered things from CafePress? I have. I got a custom shirt so poorly made that the shirt pieces weren’t properly aligned when it was sewn and there was a hole in the side of the shirt. I have a friend who ordered a custom SIGG water bottle and received a cheap knockoff. Maybe those kind of shenanigans fly when you’re trying to make custom things for yourself, but you want a gift for someone? Bags of Love is going to give you a quality product that you won’t have to be embarrassed about when you give it. And they are capable of some CRAZY fast shipping if you need it. I don’t know how much it costs, but this thing was in my hands all the way from across the Atlantic Ocean within 24 hours of my being notified it had shipped.

Freshly wrapped! Even on an unattractive plastic table it looks lovely!

Good paper is worth its weight in gold to me. This notebook is full of good paper. My only complaints are those which plague the very nature of all paperback notebooks. This is a solid product, and I would gladly spend my own money with Bags of Love. Thanks again to them for providing this sample!

Custom Pocket Notebook at Bags of Love

DIY Phone+book Case

This is a project that anyone with a complete disregard for the mind-numbing tedium involved can complete.

Making this project will turn you into a hipster lunatic, as pictured here

You’ll need a sharp knife, some kind of proper glue (for unfathomable reasons I chose a glue stick—Pioneer extra strong permanent bonding), a pencil, and a phone thin enough to fit in a notebook. Or a notebook thick enough to conceal your lumbering phone.

Not pictured: the requisite phone for the case

Unless you really hate your writing, you’ll want to get an unused notebook, preferably one with useless paper. No sense wasting good paper.

Got this on sale when Borders went under. Cool cover, but blank/plain Moleskine paper is pretty much the worst. Finally found a use for it!

The easy part: hold the phone next to the paper of the notebook, so you can see how far down in the depth of the paper will be sufficient to fully conceal the phone. Open up the notebook where, if the phone were in the notebook, the page would be flush with the screen.

This is the worst tutorial explanation.

Put your phone where you want it to nest on the page and carefully trace around it. Scream like a pterodactyl when you still manage to get graphite on your precious technological baby. Once you have your outline, start cutting. A metal ruler helps on the straight edges. Check your work periodically–get all the paper dust out of the hole and see how your phone fits. Keep cutting until the phone in the hole is flush with the top cut page. Once that’s done, start gluing. This part will be tedious. Say goodbye to huge swaths of time. Question your decision to undertake this project. Once you’ve glued all the cut pages together AND THE GLUE IS DRY, check your work again. You’ll probably have to do some touch-up trimming for the phone to fit properly again.

Almost like you can’t even tell. I swear it looks a little better in person. With the band on. With the phone actually inside instead of taking the picture.

When it’s done, the glue and your inability to line up the pages properly will give the notebook a slightly used look while concealing what’s inside. The downside: no access to ports, buttons, or the main camera. The upside: UNPARALLELED STEALTH.

And unparalleled nostalgia.

And I’ve left access to the back pocket, as well as some pages in front and back in case I absolutely need to write something on paper. It’s surprisingly secure (I cut carefully to make sure it would fit just so, though it will undoubtedly get looser over time) yet easy to get out by pushing on the back of the pages and flexing the block of glued pages a bit.
Or if you’ve got money to drop, you might do better to either get something like theGOODbook case, or pay someone to go insane making one for you.

Daycraft Cookie Bookie

This is the most unreasonably adorable notebook I have ever seen, and that includes all manner of miniature assortments of bound paper. I couldn’t even mentally process how precious it was when I first received this sample from Daycraft. How can words ever hope to convey this:

Midnight snack edition

I’m afraid I can’t attest to how sturdy it may or may not be, because whenever I see my Cookie Bookie I just want to wrap it up in a paper-lace napkin and cradle it and remind myself that it’s not for eating.

I swear I’m not going to eat it! I just wanted some tea! Who would even use chopsticks to eat a gigantic cheese cracker, don’t be ridiculous.

The cover is that same irresistibly, touchably soft Italian polyurethane used in the Daycraft Signature Diary, with the added bonus that the Cookie Bookie cover is ever-so-slightly-squishy. Beautifully made, down to the little thread cheese dots in the cracker.

Lance wishes their crackers looked this pretty

Even the spine keeps up the appearance, properly recessed and cheesy-looking. I’ll have to get back to you on how well this holds up, but top marks for style.

Dishware not included

No elastic band or any other type of closure mechanism (that would ruin the illusion), but the book easily stays closed on its own (and strongly takes into consideration your request for it to remain open).

Love the slightly darker cheese border around each page

The paper did well with most pens I tested, including many fountain pen inks (particularly the quicker-drying inks like Lamy and Sheaffer). Thicker, wetter, slower-to-dry inks and the Sharpie Marker had a bit of shadowing on the other side of the page, and a couple dots of bleedthrough on the heavy inks.

The beginnings of bleedthrough with Noodler’s La Reine Mauve in a Caran d’Ache broad nib

The effect was very minimal, not something that would get in the way of my using both sides of the paper.

Is there any color I can’t use on this paper? …maybe highlighter orange?

I think I’ve found my new perfect paper for writing with the Uni Signo Broad white gel ink pen. Look at that ink pop!

NOW FOR SOME GOOD NEWS!

First of all, at the Daycraft website you can now order their products online with free worldwide shipping. Just PAY ATTENTION, all the listed prices are in Hong Kong dollars. So when you see HK$129, take a deep breath and pull up a currency converter, because at time of writing that’s just $16.63 in the US. Hopefully in the future the website will integrate a currency converter in the website, at least perhaps a drop down menu you can pick from if not automatically detecting the country you’re in, but one step at a time. The biggest thing is I can now review these notebooks and you can all actually buy them!

Good news #2: To celebrate Father’s day, Daycraft is offering shoppers who buy The Moneywrap online before June 18th a Father’s Day bonus – 20% off their next Daycraft purchase of other products. That’s $56.46 [at time of writing] for a sweet leather wallet. Feel free to buy me one, even though I’m not anyone’s father.

Thanks again to Daycraft for providing this sample for review!

The Cookie Bookie in Cream Cookie, Cheese Cracker, and Lemon Waffle at Daycraft