I realized a few things while creating travel books with the Small Moleskine Sketchbook. The first one is that the small notebook is just too small to sketch confortably and the second one is that the paper is terrible.

They are currently using a paper that looks yellowish, but in fact is white paper coated with that strange finish, which fades when erasing, and is pretty much useless for watercolors, specially if you want to make light washes.

Thankfully I found this great tutorial from Trumpetvine called Moleskine Reloaded, which explains how to rebind a notebook with your own choice of paper.

Step 1

The first step is to find or buy a Moleskine Notebook. I decided to use on of my Large Moleskine Notebook, since I'd only used a few pages anyway. Measuring the pages, I found that the pages were 130mm x 209mm.

Step 2

I already had a large block of Canson Montval 200gsm watercolor paper, so I decided to cut my folios from individual sheets, rather than buy a very large sheet  and use that. I cut 20 sheets down to 260mm x 209mm.

Step 3

Each sheet was folded down the middle and creased with a spoon. I then created each signature with two sheets, trimmed them and used a corner punch to create the rounder corners. I then punched the six holes to bind all the signatures together.

Step 4

Because I used the larger notebook, I made 6 holes instead of 5 and used a slightly different binding method. I used thread, wax and glue from lineco, and glued a mesh on the finished book block to give it more structural integrity. The sewing was the part that I was the least sure of, but it turned out to be rather easy.

Step 5

The last step was to assemble my new watercolor notebook, and glue to the Moleskine cover. I carefully separated the old book block from the guard pages, and replaced it with my new book block. I left the notebook to dry overnight, under a pile of heavy books. Once that was done, the bonus was to document the whole process in that same notebook. Being able to use light washes on real watercolor paper made a huge difference.