Notebook Case

I can't take up a new hobby without being a total nerd about it so when I became more interested in wine and began reading about it I came across a suggestion that you keep notes of all the wines you try. This made a lot of sense to me because if I drank one glass of a wine that I liked at a restaurant, what was the likelihood that a month from then I'd remember the variety or where it came from, let alone the name of the vineyard?

So I bought myself a little tiny notebook for like 86 cents figuring I would carry it with me in my luggage sized purse so when I tried a wine I could just write down the basics about it plus how much I liked it. It then occurred to me that the inside of my purse can be a brutal environment where things get worn, bent and sticky. I don't get the chance to try wine as often as I'd like so if this notebook was to survive long enough to get filled up, how would I protect it?

The most obvious solution to protect an 86 cent notebook was of course to spend hours making a cover. So I found some scraps from an old pair of jeans and cut out two pouches, one just a tiny bit bigger then the other. I sewed up three of the sides on each pouch and then put one inside the other and sewed the tops together (leaving a gap so they could be flipped inside out). I then used the gap to flip them and I had a lined pouch with no raw edges (except of course of course for the gap which I sewed up.

(There were some complicated deductions in there to make sure that the pouch ended up with the right sides out and the wrong sides hidden on the inside but it was done by trial and error so I'm not going to try to explain it because I don't really remember.)

I almost forgot, when I was sewing the tops of the two pouches together I also stuck in a tab of denim I had made so I could make a closure. When it was all done I added on a snap to the tab and the bag to keep the notebook inside.


If these don't sound like very good instructions it's because they aren't. I basically just made it up as I went along since I have no patience for patterns or instructions. In the end though it worked out pretty well and it was a free way to prolong the life of my 86 cent notebook! (Am I cheap or what?)


But with the money I saved I can buy more wine, which was the point of this whole endeavor to begin with.