Take note

Do you have a weakness for notebooks? I admit, I do. A notebook full of family history notes. A holiday journal. One with the menus we’ve served when we have people round for a fancy meal, so we know what worked, what didn’t, and don’t risk serving the same people the same food every time they visit (that one hasn’t been used in ages; we’re so reclusive). A notebook for the book I’ll never finish writing. When we first bought our house, I started one for planning the garden. It’s been hardly touched since, but I’ve rediscovered some of the joy of gardening of late, and have picked it up once again to record what grew well this year, and what would be worth trying next year. I’ve recently started one to keep track of my sewing progress, complete with fabric swatches. Let’s hope it goes better than the gardening progress, eh?

When I was at school we had ‘commonplace books’. The name was a mystery to me at the time, but keeping those books, with their quotes, notes and other information, had been around since the middle ages. They were a place for scholars to track interesting things and develop their ideas. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, the famous detective keeps commonplace books. My notebooks are somewhere between commonplace books and journals. The genealogy notebook and writing book are full of facts, my holiday journal is definitely a journal, and the gardening, knitting and sewing volumes fall neatly in the middle, containing both what I’ve done and observations on what I’d like to do.

These little books are definitely useful. The knitting one is packed with reminders on how I resized patterns – very handy if I want to reknit something, or knit something new and want to know how something similar got tweaked – and patterns I designed myself. The sewing notes are accompanied with swatches of fabric and other images. It’s mostly bare at the moment, but hopefully it won’t stay that way forever. Having so many books is possibly a modern luxury, but putting all the information in one book would be very messy and disorganised, and make it difficult to find the right notes straight away.

If you do keep notebooks are you an ‘all in one’ person, or do you have books for different topics?