Thank you for your experiences!
I think your books look good! 
Congratulations!
Looks awesome! Post more when you make new stuff 
Currently I’m making 2x A5 hardcover notebooks from 90gsm Claire Fontaine paper, one is pre-printed with dots, the other is lined. I can share PDF or PSD files should anybody be interested in printing A4 sheets for book binding. I’ll use textile to cover these and possibly some art-deco textile painted design. I’m also making a hardcover square notebook from Tomoe River 52gsm paper and thinking about a colour-laserprinted custom cover design.
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I made an A5 notebook with hard cover. The cover and spine is 3mm thick cardboard paper and covered with bookbinding textile that already had a thin paper glued to its back. I used Navigator 160 gsm paper for the first & last sheet for the text block. I glued a thin decorative paper on it. The signatures are made from 90 gsm Claire Fontaine A4 sheets folded in half. Using a colour laser printer I printed olive coloured dots with a spacing of 6 mm. I added a satin ribbon bookmark and a rope covered with the same silk for headbands. (The width of the text block is just a tad bit wider than the ribbon)
Some things I’ve learnt in the process:
- I was not able to control duplex printing well enough for the dots of these folded pages to align in the signature well. Thus I ended up manually flipping the papers and printing the other side separately.
- Make sure your blade is very sharp when cutting the text block so as to have even paper size. Otherwise the edge of the text pages will be uneven and rough.
- I’ve used a masking tape for masking wallpapers (hardware store) to attach a temporary cover to the text block before spraying it with gold paint. It worked well and was easy to be safely & completely remove from the paper.
- I’ve bought the gold paint in the hardware store so maybe it was not the best one for spraying paper. As I understand the paint dries within a couple of hours but it’s around 48h to have it completely dry. When I removed the masking tape after something like 6-8 hours, some thin gold foils fell from the masking tape and the gold particles ended up sticking to other surfaces like my keyboard and mouse. Since the text block is completely dry, I haven’t experienced any problems, the gold is fixed on the paper, I can’t even scratch a tiny piece off of it.
- I put the text block between wooden planks. It seemed pretty OK but some of the paint got between the pages at the 1st and last pages. I’m in the process of making another notebook where I used a book press and I have less gold seep-in issues.
- I followed Sea Lemon video instructions and had a board width of text block width - 1/8" and a hinge of 1/4" + cover board width (6,35mm + 3 mm in my case). This was not enough, the text block was too wide for this cover. At this point I could have cut a couple of millimetres in width from the text block but the edges were already sprayed with paint so I decided to stash the cover and make a new one with a wider hinge. I added another 3mm for the hinge and it proved to be a good fit. I’m not sure what went wrong. My theory would be that the moisture of the PVA glue got the textile bended too much at the hinges or I should have factored in something for the thickness of the textile itself.
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Congratulations! Very good work!
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I’ve made a writing pad as well. I glued together the papers at their edge using 2 layers of regular transparent school glue. It has bound the sheets together stronger than what you have with a regular writing pad but you can still remove pages from the block easily. At least the text block doesn’t fall to pieces prematurely.
After the glue was dry I didn’t cut the edges to an even size because I liked the uneven looks of it. I sprayed the sides with a light blue water based acrylic paint (Molotov Coversall Acrylic Shock Blue).
I used 2mm cardboard for front & back. The reason I made a front cover is that I wanted to make the whole thing fancy (it was a gift).
Since the text block gets thinner and thinner, the spine is made from 3 stripes of cardboard and I cut their edge to have a trapezoid cross section and also added a little space between them. This way the spine can bend. Something like: 
I covered the front & back with some decorative paper (Pepin Van Gogh) and a bookbinding textile to cover the spine and hold the pieces together.
I used bookbinding PVA glue to glue the last page to the back cover and a piece of ivory-white 250(?) gsm paper for the inside of the front.
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Congratulations @petrisz!
The pad looks very very good!
I prefer 2 mm cardboard, because it is stiff!
With this one the back cover and the spine is cloth and it hangs over to the front cover (the edge of the textile is tucked under) while the front cover is color laser printed on 160 gsm paper. Unfortunately the paper at the edges got too much stress when bending and the fibers got pulled a bit therefore white fibers are visible. Other than this it’s pretty neat for a homemade notebook. This time I’ve also sprayed matt acrylic varnish on the front cover before gluing it to the textile and the rest of the cover. This is supposed to better protect it. Maybe it was not necessary because as I understand the laser printing already forms some protective layer on the ink, but I wanted to make sure and wished to see how this acrylic varnish works anyway.
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Great thread! I have had pad compound as sold on Amazon on my list but have yet to purchase it. You all are way way way ahead of me! Looking good!
I see alot of nice work.
I just print out cute bordered lined paper using regular copy paper with a 3 hole punch and put it in my 3 ring binder.
I find that the extra fine nibs work good on regular copy paper and spiral note books that I steal from my kids and they don’t miss it or really care.
They will throw the blank pages away like a tree wasn’t sacrificed for them to write their homework answers down. 
Teenagers