Plain note books given a simple retro gaming makeover.

I am old, I can admit it, so when it comes to computer games I'm the generation who actually played Pong on the TV at my friends house and thought it was the coolest thing ever! We sat down at those table Space Invader Machines at the chip shop, played Pacman in the arcade at the seaside and when we got a computer (joint Christmas present between my brother and me) it was an Amstrad 64. We would buy computer magazines that had games printed in them in Basic and type it in, line by line and save the games on cassette tapes! "Syntax error on line 1340"

So when it comes to gaming I love simple things, Bejewelled, 2048, Minesweeper, these are my kind of games and of course the classic Tetris. 

At my day job I have to have a notebook on the go at all time, it's full of "to do" lists mainly and other scribblings that I can't manage without. But I do like my notebook to be either pretty, interesting or fun to look at.

We were clearing out some desks as part of a reorg and came across packets and packets of these little stickers, they are the kind that you get with wall planners. They come in different sizes and colours and it seemed wasteful to throw them away so they became decoration for my next notebook.

This is SO easy:

Take a plain black notebook, lay a ruler or piece of card just a cm up from the bottom edge (don't draw a pencil line on the black cover, it is too difficult to rub out without marking) and working from the bottom up, place square stickers in a Tetris design.

I looked up the shapes and colours from the original game.

I had to do some compromising as the sticker colours don't match exactly. It's almost like the wall planner manufacturers weren't thinking about Tetris when they made them!

I used the tiny stickers to do a design on a smaller notebook too.

You can see here I had to cut some long yellow stickers into squares, I had loads of left over stickers but not much variety in shape and colour. I was trying to reuse something that was heading for the bin, rather than buying something new so a bit of compromise and improvising was part of the fun.

The tiny stickers were a bit fiddly and I used a pair on tweezers in the end to place them, the slightly larger stickers were easier to work with, quicker and therefore more fun.

I covered my notebook fronts with clear stickybacked plastic (that stuff you used to cover school books with) to make the super cool Tetris design last.

I'm thinking now this would be fun to do on a whole stationery set, you could do a pen pot, magazine files, ring binders .... all sorts!

If you like this slightly geeky retro gaming idea you might also like the Tetris bag I made a couple of years ago.

I might even take 5 minutes now for a quick game of Tetris - with the sound off of course, that song drives me nuts!

Update - May 2020: I finally used the last page of my Tetris notebook and thought you might like to see how it held up. The sticky backed plastic really did a great job of protecting the design over 3 and a half years! There are a few scuffs and the tiniest bit of peeling at the edge but overall it held up really well.

I'll be linking up to these link parties