Repurposed Vintage Ledger

My daughter and I met a friend at a fabulous antiques mall a couple of weeks ago and I picked up this vintage ledger.  The spine was in pretty bad shape, but it still had lots of usable pages.  So, I decided to rebind it so I could use it to track my budget!  Following a budget isn't much fun, but I'm hoping that using a lovely vintage ledger like this will motivate me.

Firstly I cut out the insides of the journal with a very sharp knife.  I separated out the individual signatures that you can see here still bound together.

With a straight edge and sharp knife, I removed 1/4" from the edge of each signature.

I have an industrial strength binding machine to create my photo albums, but if you wanted to do a similar project, visit your local copy shop.  Most have some kind of binding machine and will be able to do it for you.

Once I had cleaned up the covers, I realized that they were too thick for the binding machine (my projects never go quite as planned), so I had to punch the holes with a heavy duty hole punch (Crop-a-Dile) - that took some wrist strength!

Once more into the binding machine to add the spirals.

Here's the finished project - I've already started using it!

 

Thanks for visiting!  Have a great day,

Ali