Fold Your Own Pocket Notebook

What you need

One sheet of paper (letter, A4, whatever you've got) and a pair of scissors. That's the entire materials list.

1. Fold it down to eighths Fold the sheet in half hot-dog style, the long way. Without unfolding, fold it in half hamburger style. Fold hamburger style one more time. You should now be holding a small folded rectangle, folded into eighths.
2. Unfold, then make one fold Open the sheet all the way back out flat. Now fold it in half just once, hamburger style.
3. Make the cut With the paper still folded in half, cut along the center crease starting from the folded edge, stopping at the halfway point. You're cutting a slit into the middle of the folded sheet, not cutting it in two.
4. Unfold flat again Open the sheet all the way. There's now a slit running through the center of the paper, with both outer edges still fully intact.
5. Fold it into a book Fold the sheet in half hot-dog style. Hold one end in each hand and push them toward each other. The slit in the middle will pop open into a diamond shape. Keep pushing until the panels fold together, then press it flat into a small booklet.

Once you've got the fold down

This is the entire trick behind every pocket notebook, zine, and PocketMod planner that's ever been folded from one sheet. Once your hands know it, you can make one in the time it takes to explain it to someone else.

The limitation is what goes on the sheet before you fold it: doing that layout by hand means measuring eight rotated, mirrored regions correctly, which gets old fast if you're making more than one. That's the part PagePacker automates: drop in the pages you want and it handles the layout math, so folding is the only manual step left.

Keep exploring

What is a pocket notebook? · Automating PagePacker with AppleScript · Zines, GTD, and the hipster PDA