A Project Using My Christmas Present

Bind-It-All Machine and accessories by Zutter. This is what my husband gave me for Christmas. I've wanted one of these since I first heard about them some time last year. This is the 2nd version of the machine. You can make covers for books, journals etc with a spiral binding. I got the machine, the tote bag to carry it in, a package of wires and a corner rounder punch. This is the machine. It's a pretty pink color. The original machine is blue.

The tote bag.

A package of 3/4 inch wire. They come in sizes ranging from 5/16 inches to 1 1/4 inches. The little plastic pieces on the key chain are guides of the different size wires.

This is the corner rounder punch. The size is 1/2 inches. They also make a 1/4 inch corner rounder punch. The neat thing about this punch is that you are able to punch several layers at a time.

Here is the project that I made using the Bind-It-All this afternoon. It is a post-it note holder. The cardboard that it is laying on is what I used for the covers. I used the same technique as I did when I made the journals with the composition books to cover the cardboard.

After I covered the cardboard, I punched the holes. This was easy because it is the same size of the machine, it punches 6 holes without any adjustments. After I punched the first cover, I couldn't get it out of the machine. I pushed and pulled and couldn't figure out what had happened. It was stuck in the machine. Then I noticed that the handle had not come all the way up releasing the cutting mechanism. After I made sure the handle was all the way to the beginning position, the cover came out easily. One of the tutorials I had watched showed the post-it-note taped to the back cover before the holes were punched. Well, it was too thick to fit in the cutting guide so I had to take the pad off, punch the holes and then tape the pad back down. Actually binding it all together was not hard at all. That is done in the front part of the machine. I tied the ribbon on the wires to finish it off. I am quite thrilled with the way it turned out and was quite simple to make. I want to experiment with some bigger sizes now.

Here's what it looks like opened up.