How to Make a Tomoe Paper Louise Carmen (or Travelers Notebook) Journal Insert
If you love your Louise Carmen but hate the Louise Carmen inserts, this one's for you
I have a hyperfixation problem, and back in March, I got up for a 4 a.m. PST call with France to customize a Louise Carmen Roadbook. For those of you who haven’t been indoctrinated, a Louise Carmen is one of the trendiest and most loved products on JournalTok. Competing with brands like Paper Republic, it's a vegan leather tri-fold notebook folio that patinas with time and can be customized with cute petite charms.
Now you’re probably wondering, “Zayna, why the heck would you do that instead of just ordering one online like a normal person?” The answer is that they didn’t have the color I wanted (Prune). I was hoping that if I got up at 4 a.m. and had a video call with a human, they would be able to make an exception. And I was right. (Also, I wanted a close-up of the charm options.)
Fast forward one week, and I get my Louise Carmen. I’m obsessed—the charms are cute, the color is beautiful, and the inserts… are terrible. Now, don’t get me wrong, for the average person, they’re perfectly fine. But, for a paper snob like me… I wasn’t impressed. After using my Hobonichi Cousin for the past few months, this was not it.
So, I decided to make my own—fellow paper snobs, instructions below.
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Must Have Materials:
Stapler
Cardstock (this is going to be your cover, so choose your weight based on that. Mine is 110 lb, I think? I’ve had it for years, so the wrapping is long gone)
Paper cutter
Scissors
Binder clips (or something to keep your paper from moving and compressed)
30 sheets of Tomoe River Paper (because that’s the entire point of this)
Optional Materials:
Colorful or patterned paper for the outside insert cover (if you want a design)
Colorful or patterned paper for the inside insert cover (if you want to hide the glued patterned paper
Glue (if you’re making the decorative cover)
Rolling paper blade (I was tricked into buying this, and I think I hate it… but I do use it when the paper is too big for my paper cutter)
Step 1: Cut the cardstock
This step is the only difference between making a Louise Carmen or Traveler’s Notebook insert. I personally prefer taking my chances with tracing the notebooks, but if you’re a stickler for measurements, you can find them below:
Louise Carmen:
Height: 9in
Width: 10in
Standard Travelers Notebook:
Height: 9in
Width: 8in
If you decided to use patterned/ colorful card stock or wanted to opt out of having a cover on your cardstock, you can skip to Step 5.
Step 2: Glue the cardstock to your paper cover (and cut it out if you need to)
The direction doesn’t matter—what’s important is that there’s enough of a paper border around the cut cardstock to wrap the decorative paper around and glue it to the inside.
Step 3: Fold the excess cover paper
Now that you’ve got the cover cut out and glued on, let’s fold it into the journal to make it pretty and get some guidelines for where to staple.
Step 4: Glue the inside of the cover on
Now that the outside of the cover is on, glue your second optional piece of paper to the inside of the journal.
Step 6: Cut the inner cover to size and crease your cover
Congrats! Your cover is finished. Now let’s add some paper—
Step 5: Straighten and compress your paper as much as you can
Now it’s time to grab those 30 pieces of paper so we can staple them into the journal! Here’s where we’re going to try and compress the paper as much as possible so our journal pages are straight. I’m just using binder clips, which aren’t perfect, but they get the job done.
Step 6: Staple away
If you’ve got a fancy pamphlet stapler, your crease should line up pretty close to the 5-inch measurement guide. Otherwise, sorry, you’re gonna have to eyeball it. But that’s why we made the cover crease earlier!
Step 7: Slice the excess pages
Bring your almost finished insert back to your paper cutter and slice those extra edges away. If you’ve got a good paper cutter, now’s the time to compress your insert so your pages are cut straight.
If you’re like me and your paper cutter is begging for the garbage, do the best you can. I’ve found that 10 pages at a time should slice just fine, but if your paper cutter is doing its job, you can probably get away with more.
That’s it!
And thus! You’ve made a Louise Carmen (or Travelers Notebook) insert! Go forth, be merry, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
xoxo,
Zayna