SO WHERE DID IT ALL COME FROM!

We as females, love stationery. Yes its a girl thing. Cute stationery, beautiful books and stationery that smells. I have Dads say to me “I just don’t get it! She doesn’t like what I bought?”. And men just don’t get it and that’s for another blog.

I thought I’d give a little background into where my obsession with school book covering and now school book covers has come from.

I have always covered books. As a kid in primary school it was brown paper and with envy I saw friends’ books whose parents took the extra step of covering in clear plastic film. Contact hadn’t been invented except as something that you stuck to the shelves in your kitchen so it didn’t mark the paintwork and they had lovely floral or geometric patterns in colours like mission brown and orange. This beautiful contact lined our kitchen draws.

This huge, possibly hundred metre roll was purchased at the local hardware store and if you were lucky enough to have your parents buy it for you, this assured that you and your siblings’ books were covered in this sticky mess for your entire junior school life.

In high school came a new phenomenon – Individuality! I attended an all girls school where even our hair ribbon, socks and undies (yes undies) were school issue. We had one place where our personality could be expressed – our stationery. Entire weeks of the Christmas break would be used for the purpose of book covering. Old wrapping paper that had been saved was put onto books and covered with clear contact (yes this had now been invented). Lots of creative book covering elements such as newspaper, magazine clippings and even shop packing from really cool stores at the time like Sportsgirl and then still covered with clear contact. Then there was the ultimate book covering – the poster. There were the posters from the inside of the Dolly and Cleo magazine which had the hottest teenage boy you could find and the only card that would trump this was the pop star poster. From this perspective I was truly blessed. For as a child and teen my Grandparents owned a record store. Yes kids, records were on black vinyl and sold in stores and had really cool covers too, and you purchased clear sleeves to protect your valuable purchase. There were no iTunes cards and EFTPOS machines, just a cash register. Sunday nights for me as a kid (and I mean every Sunday night) meant dinner at my grandparents and afterwards we HAD to watch Countdown. We had to watch Countdown, because Molly and Countdown announced the Top 10. We needed to know the Top 10 so that we knew how to arrange the singles on Monday morning from position 1 – 10. This has today made me a legend at music trivia nights but as a kid I had what every kid wanted – posters. It took a little while to train Grandad not to give them away. He didn’t think they were important once the record had been out for a while and I still today cannot come to terms with the fact he gave the huge ABBA Arrival poster away because someone else asked first! What about an empty cover he suggested? Now with my own 14 year old hormone ravaged teenage girl I can only imagine the look that would have received from me. I think I’ve gone a little off track here but you get the idea.

Then with the arrival of my own children (3 in total) I discovered nothing had changed. Bordering on obsessive at times, I would purchase beautiful papers, even buying scrapbooking papers and an arm full of poster magazines from the Newsagency then covering 100’s of books. This is no joke. It seems to me that some of you in southern states have been spared a week long torture, for in QLD we purchase all books (text and exercise) prior to the commencement of school and you arrive on the first day with every book covered and labelled and they stay at school until returned home in the last week of November. You almost dislocate your shoulder getting them from the car to the classroom. Frustratingly many books then arrive home at the end of the year beautifully covered and unused. There was a saviour during this time – the clear cover! It then even came in a tinted colour but I was never satisfied with this as a school book cover. Not pretty, cool or colourful enough for my kids (see reason why from paragraph 4 above) and after 10 years of covering enough was enough. I made 2kool4skool.

So you are seeing my first range. Covers designed with genders and age groups in mind. Covers which show personality. Which reinforce positive affirmations. Designs that have a G rating but are Kool. Covers that are fun and have a game so that the kids want to open the covers and get them on their books but once the game is done won’t have them distracted in school because they’ve solved the mystery already. If you could see what’s in my mind for what our next covers will look like you’d be very excited – I know I am!