New Book Review: Self-Made Stationery

Self-Made Stationery: Handmade Goods Designed for Me
by Kazumi Udagawa

This practical book shows different and clever ways to improvise your own stationery items from supermarket/food packaging, discarded travel ephemera, tickets, junk mail envelopes, and loose paper. There are only four chapters on how the following items can be created from scratch: notebook, memo accessories, files, folders, cases, small stationery items, and decorative gift items. This may not sound much, however each chapter is loaded with many different ideas, demos, and examples.

In the first chapter, she customized her store bought organizers by using the coffer filter as a ticket or card holder; by inserting small mini booklets; and by adhering small maps or clippings next to the notes on the pages. In this same chapter, she shows how you can create your own tear off memo board with the perforated sheets of paper.

In other chapters, she also showed different methods for organizing and storing the small paper pieces, and ephemera. For example, instead of putting them in boxes, she used plastic page sheets for business cards to store her personal “knickknack” collection of small paper pieces – packaging logos, postal & parcel items, travel items, character items. I have created my own travel notebooks with storage for the receipts, but the book gave me more ideas to make the travel notebook more interesting and effective.

The last two chapters are focused on creating the small stationery and decorative gift items with recycled/repurposed materials. At the end of the book are fourteen (14) pages of templates – corner bookmarks, message tags and greeting card pictures.

It is a great reference book for those who want to reuse/recycle junk mail, catalogs, discarded food wrappers and paper goods. Each time I opened this book, I found new ways or came up with new ideas. I would recommend that you look in this book for any stationery needs or gift before going to the store – you might end up making your own as most of them will take less than 10 minutes.

It is not yet available in the bookstores, however, you can pre-order this book in Amazon.com by clicking on the title above.