Note Me Note Books

Ellie and Mr W came to dinner. I say dinner. I mean, takeaway curry.

That is probably what you'll get too, if you come to dinner at Grit's. Because these days I'm spending all my free time not preparing delicious tender meals with a Nigella cookbook and a pouty face, but cutting up leather, threading industrial-strength needles, and trying not to guillotine the edges of my fingers with a razor-sharp blade. That is, I am absorbed with my current quiet passion, making lovely lovely notebooks.

Of course I showed them to Ellie and Mr W.

Ellie ran her fingers over the metal, laced, and gilded butterfly on the front of Collect Me, and we talked about transience, change, and the impossibility of capturing what we seek, then she stuffed it down her bra and refused to let me have it back.

Mr W is less poetic. He manages his own business, which is old world print and practical and no-nonsense. He has hands the size of dinner plates and uses them for plain and frank speaking.

First he lays his hands flat on the table and tells you what he's thinking, take it or leave it. Then he rolls his eyes when I cringe a bit pathetically and whine that the lovely lovely notebooks are maybe worth not much because I'm not a trained or professional book binder or maker or even much of a leather crafter or doer, and hey, doesn't matter, I'll give them for free, sure no-one would buy one at a fiver, not even two pounds, I'll cover the cost of materials myself, can't possibly think about it, let's agree it's a stupid idea and never mention it again.

Mr W lays his hands on the table and tells me the law. He gives me a talking to about business, cost, profit, stupidity, and tuts when I whimper. He's clearly had more than a bellyful of this nonsense. He slaps his hand down hard at misery words like can't, and sets me up with an Etsy account, ten minutes flat. Then he says, That's how things are.

So here they are. My hands and my notebooks. The working space is here. The Etsy store is here. Take it or leave it.