Mixed Bag

Lunch today was an experiment.

I went with a one pot quick-ish lunch. I boiled some chicken/prosciutto ravioli, edamame, and fresh green beans together in some water flavored with tomato/chicken broth. It was pretty quick, so that was good. And Max at his ravioli, so that was good. Unfortunately I don't think that I cooked the edamame or green beans for long enough. He seemed to like the taste because he kept returning to them and trying to eat them, but then he'd pull them out of his mouth and go back to ravioli.

Well, at least I didn't spend 30 minutes on something that he wouldn't eat. Which is good, because I've been bitten by a craft bug, and the other 20 minutes not cooking were minutes I could use making ridiculously cute little notebooks.

I've seen little folded paper notebooks online before, and even made one or two, although I normally cheese out and try to use tape to hold the thing together. For the record, that never works for me. Last night I made a pretty small one as a test and actually sewed the pages together, and learned a lot about how I want to do things differently. I've been taking notes in that notebook, on how to make new notebooks.

This afternoon's book is on the simpler side, mostly because Max was awake and all up in my grill wanting attention, and also because I don't quite have the supplies together to make it fancier. Not to mention that my raw material was part of a paper grocery bag, and the goal was a little notebook for grocery shopping lists. I am tickled with it.

  

 The outside is an 8" by 4" strip of grocery bag with veggies on it. The inside is comprised of 5 strips that are 7 1/2" by 3 3/4". First I folded everything neatly together. Next I used a stapler (this is the less pretty way) and stapled the inner sheets together along the center fold. I put the sharp bits toward the outside, so that the center is snag free. The final step was to glue the first and last inner pages into the cover.

I should probably mention that I have a paper cutter, and didn't cut these by measuring with a ruler and using scissors. It isn't anything super fancy or large, but it makes cutting small pieces of paper a snap. It might be this model, but I'm not positive. It looks about right, and is the right color. It's the same cutter I use when I pretend to scrapbook. Although I think a lot of scrapbooking paper might bite the dust in the name of little notebooks.

Also, I glued the insides in upside down so that one of my pages says FOOD, but not in the direction that I'd intended.