Stalogy cover

In fairness, I didn't really need a cover for my Stalogy as it wasn't going to be anywhere other than my desk, but... well, you all understand!

I had a browse on Etsy and found a seller who made plain, simple leather covers. I don't need any bells and whistles for the cover, just something sturdy and nice. Anyway, the seller was whpdesign and they do a range of colours/leathers etc.

I ordered a brown leather cover:

Front

Back

New Traveller's Notebook Cover

I know. I possibly don't really need another one, but... I finished my next book and wanted to reward myself. Good enough reason, right? And because the next book is about to go off to publishers, I 'needed' a cover to hold the books I'll use to track how the submissions go. You all understand.

I'd been hankering after another one from Meadowgate Leather - see this post to see which one. Unfortunately, the owner is unwell at the moment and his Etsy shop is closed. I will no doubt order the one I want once he's back to full health and the shop is taking orders again.

In the interim, I saw one in the Etsy shop Inspired Journal. I can't see the exact same one there now, but this one is very close.
These are the pictures from the Etsy listing of the one I bought:

Anyway, it arrived recently and it's beautiful! It has no pockets or anything - just a leather cover with a leather lining (i.e. two pieces of leather stitched together). It's a sand colour - more yellow/orange than the picture above (gorgeous) and has a red and white elastic closure and the same for holding the booklets (the same as is shown above). There are four elastics inside. The elastic for holding the booklets is too thick for the job and I will swap it out for some narrower red or black elastic. The size is almost A5 - it's designed to hold Moleskine cahiers, but they're horrible, so I'll either make my own booklets for it from some paper and card cut down to size, or I'll trim up some A5 booklets. I tried two A5 slim notebooks in it and they weren't too bad, so I may stick with them.

Anyway, here are pictures of mine (click to enlarge):

Exterior:

Gorgeous colour!

Interior:

The 3mm thick elastics are too thick

With booklets in (probably not the final booklets - these are my diary and notebook from my everyday TN):

It really is a beautiful cover. It's on the floppier side, so if you prefer a firm cover it possibly isn't for you, but the workmanship is wonderful. The seller was very helpful and shipping was reasonable and didn't take too long (just under two weeks from Indonesia to Scotland).

New Traveller's Notebook

In my post on Planning 2016, I said that I'd ordered another Traveller's Notebook, to hold the booklets in which I'll be doing my writing and publishing planning in 2016. But, what did I choose??

I considered whether to get a Field Notes sized cover as I have a heap of Field Notes booklets and I could have easily used them to do my goals to next action planning. Except they are not fountain-pen friendly! It would have annoyed me far too much to have the plans I want to keep, written in biro on rubbish paper (sorry to all you Field Notes fans out there). So, it needed to be good paper for the notebooks and a cover I would want to use all the time.

Midori TN or A5 size then? I had some 013 booklets that would be okay with fountain pens and quite a few A5 booklets (or they could be cut down to Midori size from A5 if necessary).

Well, the aspect ratio of A5 always pleases me more than Midori's tall and skinny size, but, A5 was going to be a touch too big to be honest, and since I had a couple of the 013 Midori inserts I could use for planning, Midori TN size it was. But which cover? There's the original Midori ones in black or brown or a whole range on non-Midori brands on Etsy to choose from.

I much prefer a stiff cover to a floppy one and I can never tell from people's pictures or videos whether the Midori TN is a stiff cover or a floppy cover (maybe someone can tell me in the comments?). I also need a colour pop. I've too many discarded Filofaxes which testify to that! So, I ordered a non-Midori TN cover (also called 'Fauxdori', but I'm not a great lover of the term). I ordered it from Sun Leaves on Etsy (https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/SunLeaves) and chose the blue colour (K on the drop down menu) with black elastics and my initials embossed in the bottom right hand corner (the way I have them on my red Traveller's Journal from Stamford Notebook Company).

I really liked the look of the ones in Sun Leaves, because the edges of the leather had been finished nicely (too often, it's just the raw edge of the leather but these are hand-finished - bevelled and burnished) and they didn't have the brass bit sticking out of the spine (which I feared would scratch my desk!). There's a great selection of colours to choose from, getting the initials embossed was included and you could choose the colour of the elastics too. I had a long look at un-dyed leather ones too, especially on Eternal Leather Goods (https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/EternalLeatherGoods) but I didn't like the brass sticking out of the spine. The un-dyed leather would turn a beautiful caramel shade in time, but it may take longer if it's a TN that stays on my desk, rather than travels with me.

So, winging its way to me is a blue TN cover from Sun Leaves. We won't get any post until the 5th January, but hopefully it will arrive soon after that! Pictures and another post when it gets here!

Leather notebook covers - review

A few weeks ago, in an attempt to pacify The Black Dog and send him away for a while, I treated myself to some leather covers for A5 notebooks, along with some A5 notebooks. Well, it didn’t pacify him and he didn’t go away, but that’s a different matter.

So, what did I order?

Two gorgeous covers and a pack of five (yes, five. Don’t start joining forces with my hubby. Five is a perfectly acceptable number of notebooks to order) Age Bag notebooks. Oh, and a couple of Clairefontaine handwriting books to practise calligraphy in, but more on those in another post. I’ll review the notebooks in another post too. This post is for the leather covers.

I ordered them from eBay, from the seller oldstaffcrafts. These were the covers I ordered: click here. I ordered an oxblood cover with a diary and a green cover (with no diary), both in A5 size.

They are made to order so took a couple of weeks to arrive (possibly this was longer than normal because the lady wasn’t well). If you want quicker delivery, don’t buy made-to-order. They came last week and are glorious! The oxblood is a rich red-brown (I would have said, the exact colour of dried blood, but that’s not all that appealing-sounding when the colour is gorgeous!). The green is very vibrant and intense, but I’m a bit worried that the colour/dye will rub off on things. I’m not sure if I should use some leather cream on it to try and seal it. Advice?

The cover:
The covers are simply made, with a straight piece of leather stitched along the top and bottom to make flaps into which the covers are inserted. The inside is the suede side of the leather and so is in the same colour. When they arrived, they smelled very strongly of the dye, but this has faded over the last week. I kept my covers plain, but you can have your initials, name or a small motif from a line drawing added to them for no added cost (though understandably, the seller will not infringe any copyright, so the motif/design must be yours).

Oxblood - front cover

Oxblood open showing diary

Green (front)

Green (back)

Green - open

The pen loop:
There is a pen loop for a slimline pen sewn into the back cover. I suppose this is my only gripe with the covers, in that none of my fountain pens fitted the loop. A bic biro fits absolutely fine, as does a pencil. I have a patterned pen (seen in the pictures) which also fits well and my Sharbo Zebra diary pen fits beautifully too (this is the pen I carry in the ultra-slim pen-loop in my Baroque and is a ballpoint and propelling pencil combined). These pens all have a diameter of 8mm (yes – that narrow!!) and sadly, none of my fountain pens have such a narrow barrel. My beloved Ohto Tasche compact has a 9mm barrel and can be forced into the holder but then will hardly come out again. I’ve been slowly trying to stretch the leather on the green cover (useful “stretching pen” = Pelikan script!) and can just about now get a pen in and out (with a slight wriggle needed). Failing that working successfully, anyone know of any nice fountain pens with 8mm diameter barrels? [though I suppose, since they are made to order, if this is a major issue to you, you could ask the maker to make the pen holder a teensy bit bigger]

Slimline pen in pen-loop

The diary:
I ordered the oxblood cover with a page per day A5 diary (without many hopes that the diary would be very good). Much as I use a day per page A5 diary for a personal diary/journal, I don’t think that this one will get used for that. It might make it into work as a day book (sans leather cover!). On that basis, I still gave it the full fountain-pen test, writing on the December 31st 2013 page, with the assumption that I wouldn’t be in work on the 1st January 2014!
The pen test was pretty much as expected: horrible. Significant feathering with ink pens. Very thin paper so even biro showed through to the other side and fountain pen bled through hugely (entirely as expected). A shame, because the diary wasn’t bad otherwise. It is made by Tallon (the same makers of the A6 diaries I reviewed ages ago) and has gold edging to the pages, a ribbon marker, is sewn rather than glued so lies flat and has a reasonable page layout. It’s a nice snug fit in the cover.

Pen test FAIL

Feathering!

Epic pen fail! (this is the reverse!!!)

The cover is a true A5 size, so ‘pretend A5’ (I’m looking at you, Moleskine) won’t fit well. But then, Moleskine make pretty rubbish diaries in my opinion and I wouldn’t ever, ever, EVER buy them again.

Overall:
I never really bought these for the diary, so the fact that is sucks ink like there’s no tomorrow doesn’t bother me. I bought them to put Age Bag A5 notebooks in and for that they are perfect. The very narrow pen loop is a bit of a shame, but I am working on stretching out the leather so I can carry a fountain pen around with me! Hopefully the dye won’t rub off on the green cover (keep you posted on that).