stationery

The Writing Cushion

How a seat-cushion solved an issue that I had with almost every notebook ever

Sven Seebeck

Sven Seebeck

— 2 min read
A picture of a A4 notebook with the writing cushion on top. On the latter is placed a Kuru Toga mechanical pencil

Depending on notebook, I am usually having the problem that the height of the notebook is causing issues writing on or near the edges of the book. I like to keep things consistent whenever possible, but it's usually on the bottom third where my handwriting deteriorates simply because it's a pain to place the hand somewhere.

During last summer already I noticed in Jose Naranja's blog-post about "Useful tools which can be kept in a Notebook" that he is using a foam-cushion to address this issue.

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One a side note I suggest to check out his work on his blog in general, the notebooks that he is creating are beyond mind-boggling.

During a grocery trip it dawned me that the same can easily be achieved with a cheapo portable seat-cushion simply cut to size! (I should have taken an image prior the cutting but a simple search for portable foldable foam seat pad will most likely yield some useful results.)

A quick cutting later and I came out with this:

A picture of the cut seat pad to work as the writing cushion. In the back an A5 notebook.
The seat cushion cut in half, which turns out to be right width for a A5 or an A6 notebook, depending on alignment. The cushion itself is about A6 size. All-in-all this does have three layers, the original seat-cushion would allow four-layers, which I though don't need.

What I like is, that this can be easily adjusted to height, depending on page-position in the book, and since the cushion is technically still in one piece, just narrower, it is nicely staying in place and not falling into its parts:

A picture of me holding a pen with the hand placed on the writing cushion on the thick edge of the notebook.
Three layers, that is the whole thing folded together

And here one example on a page with less of a gap:

The same picture as above but this time the expanded writing cushion on the thinner side of the notebook.
In this case I am using the notebook folded out, to two layers.

I am using these seat-cushions for about a year now and find them very comfortable and of course lightweight and by this saw an significantly improvement to my handwriting. Also they make choosing a notebook much easier as I don't have to take the height of the edge into consideration when looking for a new notebook.

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