This Is How I Keep My Wire-Bound Notebooks From Falling Apart

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Tired of the pages falling out of your wire-bound notebook? To fix it, you literally just need yarn. Or embroidery floss. Or twine.

Heck, even a shoelace would work!

Your spiral-bound notebooks are fine. The specific kind of notebook that I’m talking about here is the kind that uses what’s called twin loop wire binding. That’s the most common kind of DIY binding that handmade scrapbooks and journals use (see: my beloved Zutter Bind-It-All!), and if you don’t want to learn full-on bookbinding, it’s genuinely a really solid choice for a home-bound book.

This is what it looks like when the notebook starts falling apart. All those gaps between the wire loops, ugh!

… except for the part where the pages begin to slowly but steadily fall out of your cherished home-bound book, until one day you’re left with some bent wire and lots of loose-leaf paper. Twin loop wire-bound books are best suited for purposes that don’t involve a lot of wear and tear. A scrapbook, for instance, can be a great use for a wire-bound book, because once it’s complete, it’s generally handled infrequently, and gently. But those twin loops aren’t actually looped around each other, so the more use, the more handling, and the more carrying around and agitation and just plain life that a twin loop wire-bound book gets, the more the twin loops will work themselves apart, and the more the pages will start to work their way out of the binding.

It’s so frustrating!

Fortunately, the fix is SUPER easy. I can nearly guarantee you have something that will work for this fix, and that it will only take you a few minutes to complete. And then I can absolutely guarantee that your twin loop wire-bound notebook will never trouble you in this way again!

Materials

For this project, you will need:

• something you can thread between the loops. The material has to be thin enough to be threaded through the narrow side of the twin loop binding, but otherwise, anything works. This project works with yarn, ribbon, shoelaces, twine, strips of fabric, and embroidery floss. Heavy duty upholstery thread also works, although your typical polyester thread is too breakable.
• (optional) plastic tapestry needle. These generally have an eye wide enough to handle any of these materials. But you can do without it if you’re fairly dextrous.

Step 1: Tie a knot at one end of the binding.

Each end of the wire binding will end in a straight bit where the binding was cut to fit the notebook. Don’t tie your knot there, since it can slip off. Instead, tie a knot around the first loop. It doesn’t matter if it’s a wide loop or a narrow loop; either size will keep the knot in place.

Step 2: Wrap the yarn around every individual loop.

You can do this a couple of different ways, depending on whether or not you think you’ll ever want to disassemble this notebook.

If you know you’ll never want to take your notebook apart, tie a half-hitch around every loop you pass. It’s easy and looks tidy, and your binding will stay put forever!

However, the notebook I’m working on in these photos is my national parks passport stamp book. Sometimes I like to carry my whole book around, but sometimes I like to travel super lightly. For instance, did you know that there are something like THIRTEEN national park sites in New York City alone?!? If I’m flying carry-on only to NYC, then traveling via public transit and on foot across the length and breadth of Manhattan, I am NOT lugging that entire giant passport book every step I take. Instead, I open up the binding, remove the pages I need, and hop on my plane! So I don’t want to tie a knot I’d have to untie around every individual loop every time I want to unbind it.

So if you think you might want to unbind your book at some point, instead of a half-hitch, just loop your yarn twice around every individual wire loop. It looks maybe 2% less tidy and polished, but it keeps the binding just as secure, and when you want to unbind the book, you can snip the yarn near one of the knots, or untie the knot, and easily unthread the whole binding.

Your book is now perfect! This technique also keeps the notebook’s pages looking a lot nicer, because it’s hard on the pages to be constantly half-falling out of their binding. This is also an especially good fix for a child’s notebook, since kids tend to be a lot harder on their stuff and get a lot more frustrated when something breaks.

Not that I don’t get Big Feelings when it comes to my national parks passport stamp book, ahem. I only have 399 more stamps to go!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!