I've been sketching and drawing for the past few months in homemade sketchbooks. Making your own sketchbooks is something I'd recommend to any artist, especially ones like me who need as few barriers as possible to daily practice. Nothing available commercially was functioning the way I needed it to (which is why I have a shelf packed with half-filled sketchbooks that kinda worked for a while and then stopped working), so I started making my own.

Custom making my books means they do exactly what I need them to do for the way I work. For me the important things were: the right size (about 7.5x10.5), landscape orientation, hard cover, heavy water media paper, no spiral in the gutter, lay flat when open, and most importantly short. I don't like carrying around old, stagnant things (like drawings I did a year ago that now have nothing to do with me), so none if these books is longer than about 32 pages. Long enough to develop an idea and then move on.