I've always been a hoarder of notebooks, and I love having lovely pads with fabric covers and top quality paper inside. The problem with these is that they're too nice to write in! When it comes to practical use, I favour the Pukka pads as I remember them from my university days as being good quality and practical for daily use. I recently began a dressmaking evening course, and discovered I still had one of these Pukka pads lurking round in my drawers, so I have been using it to make notes as I'm discovering new techniques, and also for doodling my drawings when I have an idea for a project to work on.

I've had this pad a while as I think it was leftover from me buying a set of these a while ago, but I have seen them in the supermarkets when I've been doing the food shopping and they now come in all sorts of funky colours such as pink stripes, unfortunately mine is the boring green variety which costs around £3 for a 200 page A4 pad.

The pad I am reviewing is A4 in size, but they also come in smaller A5 versions too. It has a green cover and is spiral bound as in the picture. The quality of the pad is one of the reasons I love this brand, the spirals stay in place and don't end up getting stuck into your clothing or snagging on the inside of your bag as you're transporting it. The paper is thick and lined, and is good enough quality to write on both sides without it showing through. The paper has a bit of a shine to it, and is smooth to write on, so your hand just glides across the page.

The individual sheets in this pad are perforated, meaning that if you want to remove the sheets you don't have to rip by the spiral binding. This helps to keep the spiral bit intact, but also avoids that horrible unsightly fraying you can get once you've ripped a piece of paper out of a pad. The perforation tears well, without ripping the page, and also provides a little extra margin so that you're not resting your hand on the spiral bit whilst writing.

My recent use of this pad has posed no problems, and I like keeping all my notes together in one place so I can refer to them when needed. Although I'm not making any notes on the course itself (it's a bit more practical and "hands on"), I like to make notes when reading some of the books I have bought, and I find this pad incredibly handy for that. It does have four holes pre-punched so you have the option to rip pages out and store them in a ring binder, but personally I prefer to use the notebook and keep all my notes stored in the pad without having to bother with ring binders. The perforated strips are strong enough for the pages to not start becoming detached unless you want them to.

The only negative I would say about this pad is that it works best when using rollerball pens, as proper ink can smudge very easily due to the shine on the paper. I usually use rollerballs anyway, unless I'm trying to annotate in different colours and sometimes I've tried using an ink pen which hasn't been quite so successful and has made a mess of my nice neat notes. This is the only negative though, and doesn't annoy me enough to drop a star.

Overall, though, I would always pay a bit extra for the Pukka range rather than opting for "value" or non-branded paper. It just makes daily tasks that little more pleasant.

(Review may also be posted on Ciao under the username Gingerkitty)