Upcycling A Book Into A Planner/Bullet Journal

Over the past couple of years, I've switched between using a planner to trying out a bullet journal only to finally settle on a little to do notebook. While I love using my to do notebook, I missed using a planner and I wanted to put the bullet journal tracking system to good use.

To make this a reality, I realized I would need to create my own planner case with a binder middle, so I would be able to add and move pages around as needed. Luckily I knew I had the perfect upcycle project for the job... I just would need to make a few adjustments along the way.

The Project

Upcycle a Book in A Planner

Instructions from See Kate Sew

Supplies Needed:

Results

At first glance I though this project would be really easy. However I quickly hit a bunch of road blocks. The first was finding the perfect book. I needed a book that was tall and wide enough to fit the binder mechanism and I wanted a book with a fun title. Eventually I found a book called 'School Days' that filled both quotas.

With that out of the way, I used Mike's knife to cut the pages out.

(Using a box cutter would have been much easier, but I used what I could find at the time).

My next problem was trying to figure out what fabric to use. After combing through my stash a couple of times, I found this lovely fabric. I easily used the spray adhesive and covered the book.

Thanks to all the practice I had last year, I didn't struggle nearly as much as I normally do installing the zipper.

After I had the zipper ready to go, I hit another road block. I couldn't figure out if it would be better to put the binder mechanism in first or to put the zipper along the outside. Eventually I kind of worked it out so that I had the zipper glued around the outside of the book and then I installed the binder mechanism and glued the ends of the zipper to the book.

I was really happy with how it looked so I moved on to putting in some inside panels. I used some scrap fabric to cover a piece of cardboard and then I hot glued them into place.

And that's when I realized there was a problem. The whole thing seemed quite bulky and I hadn't even put in the paper yet!

So I closed it to see if I was going crazy and I realized that I was not and some how I had put the zipper in wrong.

At this point, I realized there was no hope for this project anytime soon.

In the end I decided it was better if I just bought a planner cover on Amazon. I was actually just looking for a planner case, but the best deal just happened to have an undated planner inside. My plan is to just use it and then turn it into my ideal planner/ bullet journal.