You know you're growing up when you go on holiday and spend your money on stationery...

I'm a sucker for a fancy book...

I love the handmade dried-flower paper used on this notebook, the texture is beautiful, I just find myself stroking the cover. The paper used for the leaves isn't too bad either, thick like watercolour paper but with a sugar-paper-like fibres, I can't imagine it holding pencil very well, I might have a smudge-fest on my hands but I'm sure I'll survive.

As beautiful as it is though, my 17 year old brother who has not a creative bone in his body could knock up something of better quality with his gangly shovel hands. The finish really is appauling. Oh well.

Unfortunatley it's the same story for this jazzy little number. This one's compiled of fabric swatches and scraps of ribbon and to be perfectly honest looks battered and abused but I think that's part of the charm. Again, the standard is poor and if I handed something of this quality in as part of my portfolio I would hang my head in shame. The pages are that of a blank diary, but the novel thing about this book is that once you've used up all the leaves you can remove the insert of pages and replace it with a fresh notebook, clever.

THIS one however... my oh my... this is something special! As a bookmaker this is the ultimate inspiration. Both the materials and the quality are immaculate, and as glaringly obvious as it should have been I have been making books with the traditional materials with which I was taught, for some obscure reason it never occurred to me to back the covers with fabric.. I'm kicking myself.