Woven washi tape notebook decoration

A while ago I saw this woven notebook tutorial and thought it was really lovely. As a bit of a map geek, I couldn’t quite get my head around cutting one up to make into a notebook cover, but I liked the concept.

Earlier on in the year I’d ordered some washi tape to repair the pocket at the back of my diary, and whilst I was ordering the one tape I wanted, I also ordered a blind bargain (random collection of 6 tapes) for no real purpose other than I thought they might come in handy(!)

I love notebooks, especially those with good quality paper so that I can comfortably write using my beautiful inherited Parker 51 fountain pen and one of the best, cheap notebooks with decent quality paper I’ve found are these Threadbinding notebooks from Muji. But they’re not very inspiring to look at. And I look at them every day as I use them as my work day book.

So, I decided to use some of my washi tape collection to decorate my Muji notebook.

I used a plain purple tape, and a pink tape with a lattice pattern on it and used three pieces as warp, and three as weft and wove them together to decorate the cover.

It took about 3 attempts to get it to work, and 9 or 10 lengths of tape (and a few choice swearwords). I know that it isn’t perfect, and that neither the warp nor weft strands are completely parallel, but I ran out of patience (and time before I needed to go and attend to the roast dinner that I was supposed to be concentrating on at the time) and decided that this version was good enough, and also realised that there was only some much repositioning I could do before I ended up tearing the cover.

So, I have a few ideas on how I can improve the process (mostly related to controlling the tape so it doesn’t stick to everything in sight and getting the positioning more accurate), but first I’ll need to go and buy some more of the notebooks to experiment on.