The advances of technology and social media hinder the wide use of journals and papers. We prefer writing our thoughts and create a thread of diary entries on the web. 

Fortunately, some of us still find journals and planners useful. Our handcrafted pages filled up with colors and highlights glitter our busy schedules, and the smell of fresh pages still excite us.

Papers and Tschai offers medieval bounded journals.

Like many of us, we prefer specific journals to use. From page color, guide lines and cover, the combination of these always has to go together. Luckily, a local business that started from a hobby of customizing journals enlightens us that journals can be perfect the way we want to.

Papers and Tschai was founded and owned by Charo Lyn Roncesvalles or most commonly known as Tschai. This hobby of making journals started thirteen years ago.

“My main product is handmade leather journals. I hand stitch all the journals. After my first son was born, I had all the time so I had to make do of the materials and time and made journals for my friends,” Tschai says.

Tschai is a BS Architecture graduate and loved handcraft materials and journals ever since. “It slowly grew into me and over the years, it was just a hobby. I make journals as gifts for seasons like Christmas,” she adds.

The customizing business started with a simple thought that different types of people need different types of notebooks.

“People ask me why I don’t supply to bookstores and malls and I really tried to soul search if that’s really my market but after a few years, I realized that the edge of my products is I have the option to personalize the items for the specific person,” Tschai says.

Travelers’ notebooks are the refillable journals bounded by elastic bands.

Her stock items are rarely sold. Tschai states that people deserve the paper, leather and style that they personally want. Her leather journals come into two types—the medieval binding and travel notebook type.

Medieval binding is inspired by historically bound achieves. “Books now are glued but before pages were directly stitched to the material which is the leather. It is the sturdiest for archiving,” she says.

The travel notebook type, on the other hand, is the refillable notebook. Small ones of both types range from Php 650 to Php 850 and bigger sizes start from Php 1,200 and up depending on the type of paper and leather the customers prefer. Tschai gathers the materials around the city and over the years, she imported materials from Hong Kong.

“Maybe in five years time, I want to make a shop where people can visit and it will be like an art bar,” she envisions. “They can go there, get my journals, they can have journals made there as well where they can choose the paper and cover,” Tschai continues.

Tschai also envisions to collaborate with different local artists with the same passion and goals– to create and customize journals.

In her future art bar, she also envisions helping other artists, women and people with a hobby of handcrafting.

“I want to train and help people who need jobs and maybe discover a skill that they can earn a decent living from and at the same time they enjoy what they’re doing,” she says. 

Book binding is a basic skill, Tschai insists. “There are a lot of skills that people are in need to have a right venue to practice it and put value in it,” she adds. She also wants to teach handcrafting in her future one-stop shop for journal making.

The only way to learn is to experiment. “I started thinking about this [business] two or years before making my first journal. The first journal took ten to twelve hours so I researched tools and materials. It is also important to innovate and don’t give up,” Tschai advises.