Recommendation: Spiral bound notebooks.

This week's recommendation may sound a little odd. My reasons for recommending these are actually pretty practical. A spiral bound notebook was what my first book of shadows was in. It was a haphazard mess by the time I was done with it, but I am hard on my notebooks. Also, I filled the thing up in the span of about a year so it got lugged around to a bunch of different spots as I was writing in it. I was in high school, it was just a thing I did.

Less about me and my red and green covered notebook and more about these notebooks. If you can, get an A4 sized spiral bound notebook with a hard chipboard cover with heavy weight paper. If you are bold and don't need ruled lines, the spiral bound sketchbooks in that size are really economical. The A4 size (8 in x 11 in) is large enough to hold a good amount of information, work as a scrapbook if you so desire, and when closed has a small enough dimension that it is easy to carry around and store. This is why that size is super popular with people who use planners.

One of the things I love about spiral bound notebooks is that they lay flat when you open them. Finding a book that lies flat is challenging when it is not spiral bound.They also have this nifty feature where you can flip the book so that one cover is against the other, this way you can make a more stable writing surface against the two covers instead of a single one when you don't have a handy table or desk to be working on. When working with a ruled notebook, I prefer college ruled because the lines are easier for me to see. Also, the aesthetic quality of the fact that all of my notebooks have the same line dimensions is soothing to me. I, however, am a little bit odd compared to most people about this sort of thing.

I recommend heavy weight paper because it has more durability than lighter weight paper stock. This means you won't have pages randomly ripping out on you. If you happen to locate a spiral bound notebook with numbered pages, snap that up. It will save you the work of numbering pages and trying to index things after the fact.