Covering a spiral notebook

I always have a pile of little notebooks sitting on my desk allocated to different things. I hate that they are yellow and that I have to look in them all until I find the right one!

I used to cover them in contact just up to the spiral section as well as folding the edges over - as if I was back in school covering my exercise books.

Now, I take the spiral off before covering the notebook which looks much nicer and covers all of the yellow!

If you are interested in covering spiral notebooks this way, here is how I did it...

1. Grab your ugly notebook (I used Spirax No. 560 - A good size to keep in my handbag, but it also fits in the back pocket of my jeans)
2. Flip the cardboard covers out of the way and using 2 bulldog clips, hold all the pages together near the spirals.
3. Take a close look at the ends of your spiral and you will notice that they are bent inwards to stop it twisting its way off the notebook.
4. Grab a pair of pliers and bend the wire on both ends so it continues on as a spiral shape.
5. Simply twist the wire out of the holes.
6. You now have everything separated as required. As you can see the back cover is plain white on the inside so I opted to simply flip it around rather than cover it with contact and cut out all those tiny holes.
7. Cut your contact slightly bigger than the notebook cover.
8. If you don't know how to cover books with contact, just remove the backing paper from one edge of the contact.
9. Flip the contact over and line it up with your notebook cover. Once you have the contact stuck to your table and the top of your notebook cover, just start pulling the backing paper off while rubbing the contact down with your fingers. Doing it slowly prevents air bubbles. Some people used credit cards or rulers but I don't like the way it marks the contact. If you don't want to use your fingers just use a cloth or sponge.
10. Using a craft knife, trim down the sides of the contact, using the edge of the cardboard as a guide.
11. Now you need to cut out all the little holes - hence why I opted to leave the back plain!
12. Hold your covers in place with your paper (still clipped) inside and twist the spiral back onto your notebook.
13 .Grab your pliers again and bend the coils back to their original positions, or twist it around as I have. 

Now you can remove the bulldog clips and use your customised notebook.

It is actually a quick project if you are used to using contact paper, even cutting out the little holes doesn't take too long.

You will find some contact (eg. the blue notebook I covered) is still rather see through, so you may want to test a scrap piece first. For the blue notebook I just used the back cover so the pattern would still show through - luckily there is no writing on the back!