The Rambling Lead-Up

I think everyone is pretty familiar with the Moleskine notebook at this point. These little notebooks are pretty high in quality, very portable, and extremely well designed. In particular, I’ve recently been turned onto their weekly planner, which I’ve switched to for keeping track of my tasks, appointments, and phone numbers. I made the move from a digital planner/organizer, and I couldn’t be happier - I can make drawings, jot things down more quickly, and usually find things faster than with a digital PDA.

If I need more space I just drop in an index card (I keep a few in the handy back pocket). The design also includes a separate removable phonebook which slides neatly into the back pocket. Lastly, it’s much more satisfying to cross an item off a list than to click a check box.

The total cost of ownership of an iPhone is somewhere in the range of $1000 a year if service contracts are included. My planner cost me $15, and I’d argue it does a better job at some of its core functions. That makes the iPhone over 66 times as expensive. I’m not going to claim that my little black book does even nearly as much, but it’s definitely more bang for the buck.

The Project

The Moleskine planner, like all Moleskines, uses a little ribbon-style bookmark which I use to keep track of the current date. That’s great, but I also want to often open up certain other pages quickly, like the conversion tables or the weekly schedule (which keeps track of recurring things like putting the garbage out).

I’ve seen people use tabs for this, but I was worried about them being damaged in my pocket. My alternate solution to this was to add on a couple of small coloured threads to the main bookmark. I should note that any more than two extra threads would probably make it a bit trickier to open, since fumbling to find the right thread isn’t super easy. Using one or two threads is easy and quick, which I’ll explain later.

The Instructions

You’ll need:

- A Sewing Needle

- 2 Colours of Thread

- Scissors

It’s really simple. You basically just need to attach the thread to the ribbon bookmark on the Moleskine, as close as possible to the book’s binding.

There might be a better way to do it, but I just did what I’d do if I were anchoring the thread to sew on a button. I put the thread through in one spot, then back through in another, looped it a few times and then tied it off with a few simple knots. That’s it.

Using It

The problem you’ll quickly notice is that both of the threads will often get entangled if your marked pages are close together. The threads are small enough that separating them is a bit of a pain, too. That’s ok though, there is a solution.

So long as there are only two threads, you can grab both threads at once to get to the page you want. You may need to do it in two motions - one to open the book, and then a pull in the opposite direction to get to your page. It wasn’t obvious to me at first, but after a few tries it worked extremely well, and is still much quicker than thumbing through the pages.

Tags: DIY