To be completely honest, I’m still in the midst of settling into the new year.

I’ve yet to get my 2015 planner and set my goals for the year. In fact, I’ve not even sat down for a deep, introspective reflection of the past year like I used to. And I have half written blogposts piling up in my draft section.

In the midst of researching which planner to get, I came across an Etsy shop selling a pretty looking prayer notebook. When I saw it, I felt a strong urge to buy the printable so that I can quickly sit down with my bible, devotions and the prayer notebook to immerse myself in God’s words again.

Before I managed to fish out my credit card to make payment, it dawned on me that I can actually make it more useful and personal if I spend some time to customise it myself!

For my customised prayer notebook, I used the “ACTS” prayer method as a guide – Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. Because very often, I find myself rattling on and on about my “wish list” to God when I pray rather than remembering to give thanks and worship him. I also added a section on Sermons for note-taking during church service.

After I designed the notebook on Pages, I printed them out on A4 papers using the “create booklet” option so that I don’t have to manually arrange my pages.

I then hand bound the little booklet with needle and thread.

I poked holes an inch apart using one of the thicker needles.

When you’re doing so, make sure you clip the papers together so that they stay aligned.

I then thread through the holes with a piece of thread about 3 times as long as the length of the booklet.

Here’s how the binding looks like in the middle pages.

It’s a relatively cheap and easy way to keep the sheets together 🙂

See who is as excited about the prayer notebook as I am!

It’s a very simple project which only took me less than half a day from conception to printing and binding. I wish I have better editing tools to make the cover page nicer but I’m ok with it being this way for now 🙂

In case any of you are interested, you can leave a comment with your email address and I’ll send you the soft copy in Word document for you to print out and use. You can just customise it to suit your needs and choose to print as many pages as you like.

However, I’m using a macbook so the layouts and fonts may require some adjustments should you open it with Windows. If you don’t mind using it as it is, I can also send you the PDF version 🙂

Cheers to a new year and may we walk closer with God and grow stronger in faith!