I woke up feeling very sluggish and tired yesterday morning, so I decided to do something that didn’t take much thinking. And that turned out to be making more notepads. I raided my stash of old calendars and found these:

1) Some calendars with example pics of the back, 2) an old home decorating magazine freebie diary, 3) a rainforest calendar with a title page and pics on each month that were perfect for making notepads, and 4) a Lonely Planet calendar that looked very promising, too.

As it turned out, I was right about the rainforest calendar – I got several good looking notepads out of it – but was wrong about the Lonely Planet one. I suspect travel pics aren’t going to be as generally appealing as animals, art, landscapes, etc. unless someone has actually been to the place in the image. But in playing with that calendar, I realised that not only could I look for images that could be cut into strips, and had something interesting on the bottom section, but I could also fold the notebooks sideways, and so anything that had something interesting on the right-hand side was good, too.

The best source of notepad covers was the diary, from which I got lots of good-looking notepads ranging from pooches to food, landscapes to gardens and interiors.

I have a LOT of notepads now, but I’ve already given away most of the previous batch. I’m going to put these in a bowl and tell visitors that they can take as many as they want. I was also thinking of posting them instead of Christmas cards.