So, here’s my final review on the bookbinding kit that I bought:

It did what it was supposed to do: give me a sense of whether I wanted to do this, at a manageable cost which included most of what I needed. In addition to the contents of the kit, all I needed was a pair of scissors, a paper guillotine (on loan from more craft-minded relatives), and enough sewing abilities to reattach a button.

Some older Amazon reviews complained about there being barely enough paper for all three projects but the version I received came with enough a5 notebook paper and decorative paper to make the easier projects 1 and 2 twice each plus the naked text block once. (This is assuming that you use regular printer paper cut down to an appropriate size for the hole punching guides required by the various projects).

The kit had some unclear instructions. Step 21 of project 2 asked me to sew into the wrong hole, although it was fairly easy to see what I was really supposed to do instead. Step 14 of project 3 had okayish text instructions and a very unhelpful diagram…but I then blew off the rest of the diagrams and missed out on important clarifications to the later and unhelpful text instructions to “make a kettle stitch every time you reach X point.”

My main takeaway was that I was not particularly interested in the sewing side of things, and that the resulting unlined notebooks did not appeal to me as much as my hoard of shiny Chiltern notebooks and limited edition Moleskines (all lined, thank you very much). The process of attaching the text block to a cool cover and set of end papers, on the other hand, that intrigued me, and my next experiments involved a couple of author’s proofs of Wolf’s Trail that I had lying around…