Handbound Planner for 2020

Every year as the new year begins, I am ready for a fresh start. I don't really do resolutions, but I do try to begin as I mean to go on. It's a good time to reassess.

One of my favorite things about a new year is a new planner. I'm an old-fashioned girl and like my paper planner book, and have tried several different styles. (Yes, my name is Shelley and I am a planner geek!) In my old age I have become rather particular, to the point that I began to consider making my own, and maybe putting it into a small 6-ring binder. Then I thought I could bind it as a book (and make use of those bookbinding workshops I’ve taken) and get exactly what I want. That sounded like a lot of effort. Was it really worth it? I kept hunting for the perfect planner.

Well, no matter how hard I looked, the perfect planner wasn't out there, so last year I started playing around with Microsoft Word to design what I wanted. I still wasn't sure I'd follow through with printing and binding, but really, why not? So halfway through last year I printed 6 months of planner pages, and bound them into a book, and I used my planner happily, but kept finding typos (the downside to using Microsoft Word is having to create each page separately).

The next obvious step was to up my game and try programming my pages so they’d generate themselves. When I had worked at the publishing company, way too many years ago, we used a program called TeX to set our pages. That program has been built upon and is now freely available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. With the tutorials available online, I was able to relearn how to use it, and spent many hours programming a layout and coding to generate dates for the planner. Last year I was able to bind a book with weekly pages for July through the end of the year. This year I have the whole year in a bound book. Ta-da!

sewing the text block

July-December 2019 and the full year of 2020

weekly layout over two-pages

the planner in action

pretty end papers

grosgrain ribbon bookmark

My younger son gave me a punching cradle for Christmas/Hanukkah (for punching the sewing holes in the signatures). He had mail ordered it, so I waited for it to arrive before I put the planner together. It was a real treat to have such a nice tool for bookbinding. I used scrap fabric to make the book cloth. Although I didn't have it bound and ready to go on January 1, it was finished about a week into the new year, and I declare it a success!

Pertinent details: I used 24-lb 100% cotton Southworth resume paper in white, folded into signatures of 4 folios (4 pieces of paper folded in half, creating 16 book pages). The paper is a nice texture and I can use fountain pens in the planner without too much bleed-through to the other side of the paper. The upside is that it's available at Staples and is affordable. The downside is that the grain of the paper runs the wrong way. Ideally, the paper grain should run parallel to the spine, and with most printer paper, the grain runs lengthwise, so when the paper is folded the grain runs across the width of the book rather than parallel to the spine. It hasn't caused problems.

This project has given me a little more confidence in my bookbinding abilities, and I’ve already started work on a few more books. These are sketch books and blank books, and eventually a book with watercolor paper for my daughter.

I would like to put out a big thank you to all the bloggers and YouTube video creators who so generously shared their knowledge with the world. I made good use of online tutorials and videos to learn new techniques as well as to jog my memory when putting together the books.

Looking forward to more bookbinding practice this year.

Shelley in CT