Tag Archives: pocket notebooks

Review: Lodestone Letterpress Pocket Notebooks

As you can see from the pictures the designs printed onto the covers are simple and clean. I particularly enjoy that they hearken back to the Oklahoma state song with a few words from the song with simple images. The wheat stalk on orange is particularly nice. The light blue with a windmill is also a nice touch. Fans of Field Notes will recognize the 3 shades as the classic butcher colors of paper used in the original colors of Field Notes. The cover stock is sturdy and feels great. The combination of spare text, simplified imagery, and card covers is very nice. The back cover sports a simple company label.

Inside the sturdy covers are 48 unruled pages of white drawing paper. I’ve tested it out with pens, pencils, watercolor, brush pens, and light watercolor washes. With the wetter applications of watercolor the paper cockled a tad, but overall the paper responds well to everything. My wettest M nibs showed some signs of soak through but most FP inks did okay, with show through here and there, but not so much as to make the verso unusable. Mostly I really liked this toothy paper with pencils and brush pens. I responded the best to these tools.

The whole thing is held together with 2 sturdy silver staples. The corners are square. I’ve been carting mine around as a general sketchbook for the last few weeks and It’s very sturdy and capable. I like it and Spencer deserves some support for his cute sturdy notebooks.

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Lined Notebooks and One Off Packs

I finally listed the lined notebooks on my etsy account. You can find them here and here. The first link is to the general lined page with regular 3-packs of black, recycled covers, and a few packs of other colors. The second link is to the lined rainbow Allies packs. Get it, rainbow notebooks with straight lines inside are allies? It made me laugh.

I’m testing out a feature on Facebook that they have recently rolled out- shops. Some people aren’t able to access them yet, but many are. I’ve loaded up a few sets of one off books to Facebook. If they don’t sell by the end of next week I’ll go about putting them on etsy but for now, I really want to test out the facebook shop feature. (They don’t take a cut or percentage or even listing fee like Etsy does, so it might be a good way to sell things in the future.) You can find my Facebook shop here. The one offs are made of paper that I bought years ago for art journaling purposes and never used, now I am. Many of the covers feature some subtle glitter. All the loose glitter has infected my printer, shear, corner rounder, and life.

Organization: Pocket Notebook Set Up

I often refer to  how I set up my Field Notes on social media, but I’ve never done a full blog post about my set up. I keep waiting for a time when I have just set up a new book but not written much yet. I am finally at the perfect moment- I have just started a new book and have only filled a few pages.FNindexedI start by numbering each page, preferably with a red Uniball Signo 0.38. If I can’t find the red I’ll use a black ultra fine pen. I use the Signo for it’s waterproof ink and super fine writing capability. It also does not feather or bleed on any paper.

The first page becomes my index. I fold the page in half and write 2- 48. Each line represents a page in the book. As I fill the page, I log it on the index page. I try to stick to simple one or two word descriptions. This lets me find pages with ease. On books with a large top margin (Ambition/Word.) I’ll write an expanded description on this line, otherwise, nothing.FNindexedI have a few set pages that I put in each book. Page two is always a catch all page. This page captures quick info; phone numbers, passwords, websites, words, page numbers, and the like. Specifically info that is ephemeral and I may not need to dedicate a full page. Page three becomes my shopping list. Generally, this isn’t for things like bread and milk, but larger items we run out of less often; light bulbs, laundry detergent, or things like staples, glue, etc… The things I might forget to buy when I’m in a store like home despot or target.  Pages four and five are my to do lists. Four is usually dedicated to my blog while five is my school and life. Page forty-eight, the final page of the book, is always my pen and pencil testing page. This lets me test out pens or pencils in store to see how they will work on this particular paper. Then page forty-seven is where I log the types of brews I’m using for my coffee.  How much coffee to water was used, how did the brew turn out, etc.FNindexed FNindexedFNindexedThe final addition to the book is a 3 month calendar. You can find them online or as a word template. I print one off and then cut out 3 months. I use washi tape to stick it into my book over my address section. I cross off the days as I remember, but this has become very useful when I’m planning things for classes and meet ups with friends and I don’t want to drag out my planner.FNindexedAfter that the rest of the book is a free for all.

When the book is filled I log it into a master index book and file it away. The master index is another field notes book where each page looks like the index for each book. Each book is logged on it’s own page. The descriptions are expanded slightly to be more descriptive, but only if they need to be. If the index states “paper,” it is expanded to state, “Theories F14,” so that I have a better idea of which paper it refers. However if it’s logged as “journal,” there is no need to expand upon that , unless the journaling deals with something specific that I may need to refer to later. This system lets me grab my index book, flip to about where I think I logged something, scan through quickly and find that “Theories F14” entry and pull the right book in less than a minute.

Of course this system works because I’m only searching through an index of 20 or so books. (I did not go backward and index my older books, I’m not quite that neurotic.) As my index, and number of books, grows searching will become more difficult and more time consuming.While I was a wiz with the card catalog when I was a kid, I don’t relish the idea of combing through multiple index books. At some point I will need to digitize my collection of notebooks. I’m resistant to this now, but I do see the need for it later, as I amass more and more books. I’m not sure what application I’ll use to do this- Evernote, OneNote, or some other platform. Who knows what will be available when I do finally decide to digitize.