 Hey guys, how are you? So I got this idea recently to make some all-black notebooks or drawing books from something I saw from my friend Vicki Brown and I will include her YouTube channel in the description below. It's not something she showed on her YouTube channel though. She does a lot of doodling. I don't really do doodling like she does, but I got the idea from some work she showed off camera to doodle some file folders. These are two pieces of file folders, black ones. I'll show you. Yes, file folders come in black. I use file folders a lot for the covers of my sketchbooks that I make. I like it. It's nice, heavy cardstock. So I just cut it, I cut the tab off and I cut the fold off and then I doodled on it with a white gel pen and a white paint pen. Came up with this. I don't doodle like Vicki Brown, but you know, it's good. So we're going to cut these now to seven by ten inches, which is the, which will make a five by seven sketchbook, which is the size I prefer to draw in. So the first thing we're going to do is cut this to seven and then ten and I always save the pieces, the bigger pieces at least, they make great little scraps to use in other projects. I'm going to do the other one. I have some black drawing paper. Now I prefer 60 pound or better drawing paper. 60 to 70 pound preferably somewhere is my preference. Um, This is 64 pound black paper. These are 11 by 14 sheets. And so we're going to use this for the inside. I'm going to cut a bunch of them to the same size as the covers and I'll be right back. Now we need to fold all the pieces of paper in half and I cut one of the covers a half an inch shorter than my preference. It's only six and a half to accommodate the paper that I had because I didn't really want to waste any of the paper and the paper is 14 inches long, but when you cut seven inches off of it, the other seven inches included the part with the holes and I didn't want the holes from the spiral binding. I usually try to buy my paper unbound so I don't have to deal with that, but I couldn't find the paper that I wanted in black unbound, so there you have it. Uh, I do have a bone folder around here somewhere right in front of my face. It's very handy when it comes to folding the paper. So each notebook has eight sheets of paper. Let's get the other one folded and you'll notice that the edges of the pages inside stick out from the cover. That's okay because we're going to trim it all to be flush. There you have it. Now we're going to poke some holes. You're going to need a sharp pokey tool or an awl or an ice pick. I'm going to get out a bookbinding needle. This is my needle keeper, one of these shorter ones. I've got some black and white bakery twine. It's called Bakery, Bakers twine. You know, I never seem to pull it correctly. It always ends up like that when it's a skein. There we go. The needle might be enough to do both books. Okay, we're going to take one of our books and open it to the center. Make sure all that page is on the top and bottom are lined up. Poke a hole, just eyeball. I'm just going to eyeball it. Poke a hole in the fold right in about the center of the book through everything. There we go. And then about an inch and a half or so from either end of that hole. I'm going to take our needle that's threaded already and I'm going to go in from the outside to the middle hole. I should really have my glasses on for this. Leave a couple inches hanging out the outside. Go into one of the other holes, cross to the last hole, pull it taut. Go back into that first hole again. Try to come out on the other side of the center string. I'm going to zoom in. I know it's a little hard to see because everything's black and white. Take your two ends, pull it taut, and then tie it in a knot. I usually tie three times. Okay, sometimes I trim the string, sometimes I don't. It just honestly depends on the mood that I'm in. Okay, once you get all the signatures sewn in, the pages sewn in, I mean, single signature, single group of pages, then you have all this stuff hanging off the edge, right? So we're going to take a metal straight edge and I'm going to line it up with the edge of the cover, and then I'm going to take a box cutter with a nice sharp blade on it, and I'm going to just run it down the edge of the ruler and cut off those extra pages, just like let's do the other one. And I'll be honest with you, some days, like with sewing the signature in on the other book, things go smoother than others. Usually it's because my blade is not sharp. So keep your fingers out of the way when you do this and make sure your blade is new and sharp. Don't feel like you have to cut through all of the pages in a single pass. Take your time. You'll have better results. Close that up so I don't jab myself. Okay, so now you have these and they could be done and you could call good and done. I'm going to take one more step. I recently rearranged my closet. I had to find my large corner rounder. I wasn't sure where I put it. Okay, found it. So I have this large heavy-duty corner rounder thing that sometimes does its job and sometimes, you know, it can't be bothered. So we'll see what happens. See what I mean? So then sometimes I get a little like hanging little thing. Okay, so then you end up with something that's like that. Okay, once you get the corners rounded, if you want to, then you're done. And you have these cute little sketchbooks that are filled with the kind of paper you like, with a cover that you like, and there's enough pages in here using both sides to just do sketches for a month and then move on to something else. I love that idea of just taking one of these with black paper for one month and doing my daily drawings in it. That would be a fun challenge, I think, so that's why I made them. Anyway, that's it for right now. Make some of your own sketchbooks. Give it a try and see what you think. Don't forget to go out and have some fun. Do something nice for yourself. And that's it for right now. I'll see you later. Bye, guys.