Materials: notebooks, magazine cutouts or pictures, rubber cement, scissors, duct tape, colored construction paper, letter stickers (optional)

For this project I dug up old catalogs from Roxy, I found these had the best pictures and I just had to use them (thanks Roxy)! One note to mention, make sure your photo is larger than the surface of the notebook. Folding the excess edges will give it a nice finished look – as if straight from the store!

Gather your materials and make sure you have plenty of table (or floor) space to work on. Start by applying a generous coating of rubber cement to the back of your photo and to the face of your notebook. Coat the whole surface. Applying glue to both surfaces will assure it’s stuck for good.

Let it dry for few seconds, doesn’t have to be all the way. Carefully start placing your photo on the cover – *remember* once it’s down, it’s not going anywhere. Gently rub it out throughout the whole page.

Moving on to the inside page – apply more rubber cement along the edges where we will fold the photo. Make a diagonal cut at the corners (if using a round corner notebook) and gently fold inwards, repeat for other corner.

Now that our photo is safe and secure, cut a good chunk of duct tape (enough to fold inwards) and place it along the spine edge to cover the edge of the picture. Press gently and fold over to the back side.

Cut a rectangle piece from the tape in the center, fold one piece in the front and in the back, repeat for other side.

Grab some construction paper and measure the inside of your notebook, this will be a nice lining to the inside cover. *Optional step: I used a corner rounder from the craft store to add a rounded corner to the lining, you can do so with scissors as well. Apply rubber cement to both surfaces and glue together. That’s it!

To further personalize my new notebooks, I added some inspirational vinyl phrases cut on the Silhouette Cameo machine. These can be easily substituted with store-bought letters or plain markers.

To be quite honest, these came out better than expected! They look like fancy notebooks from Urban Outfitters (my original inspiration for this DIY).

Fair warning- you may want to customize all the notebooks in your desk. Use neon or pattern duct tape, mix and match colors, and even add a photo to the back of the notebook, knock yourself out! Overall time for this project was maybe 30 minutes. Once you’re in the groove, it’s smooth sailing :) ENJOY!