Handmade upcycled notebooks for the craft beer fan!
I’ve always been an avid doodle/sketcher, but last year I really decided to be intentional about drawing every day. After going through a bunch of regular, plain black sketchbooks, I began looking for something that had a little more personality.
At the same time, one of my favorite things to do was sit in a coffee shop or a local bars, people watch, and just sketch to pass the time. Few things are as cathartic to me as sitting in a quiet corner, with either a cold beer or a freshly-roasted coffee in one hand and a pen in the other.
In a few of the bars, I began noticing that the six pack boxes the bottled beer comes in either gets thrown away (some places still don’t recycle), and I thought that it was a shame that the boxes that some designer had worked hard to create was ending up in the trash. After that, the idea kind of fell into place.
Some for me, one for you
Once I made one for myself (my original Mercenary book), some of my artist friends began to take notice. A few asked if I could make one for them. Eventually, I began scouring BevMo, Total Wine & More and some local craft beer shops and bars for boxes I could repurpose.
Making these for my friends, I learned a lot about what did and didn’t work. I learned about which stitching method was the most durable, and what paper was the most usable for drawing. Eventually, my friends suggested I start selling them, and hence, the Etsy shop was born.
The tasting notebooks came along after about six months, and were just a natural progression of what I was already doing that I can't believe I didn't think of it sooner.
