I began writing in a journal nearly every day mid 2020 as a way to keep track of my day. It is something I continue to do every evening to reflect on what I've accomplished and how I feel about it. The first few notebooks I used were alright, but I noticed I went through them quickly because they were small, had big line spacing, and had few pages. I searched to find the perfect notebook but never found one that met all of my requirements. After using Barnes & Noble Press to make a poetry book, I knew that designing and printing my own notebook could be a good solution to my problems. I have since ordered two of these notebooks which I explain below.

For one of the notebooks, I had friends and family draw me flowers that I used on the cover. These are all of the flowers that I received. In addition to one bonus picture at the bottom right. 

I had my friends and family use these acrylic markers which are opaque which made the quality better when I scanned them with a printer.

Once I scanned all of my flowers, I used the "image trace" function in Illustrator to turn them into vector images. Then I made sure all of the colors matched (ex all of the blues are the same shade of blue).

I also designed the inside pages for both notebooks using Adobe InDesign.

These are the lined pages-- nice and small like I like them :)

These are the bindings of the notebooks. I also hot glued a ribbon into the top of the spine to use as a bookmark.