Hot Chocolate Spiral Pad Cute, Functional By Joan Young on Nov 07, 2007 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

The Hot Chocolate paper products line is attractive. This notebook has a few added features without being pricey.

The product I bought is a wire-bound notebook, with 5 x 7 inch pages. With the binding, the notebook is about 5 1/2 inches wide. It has 80 sheets of narrow lined paper. They are micro-perfed to tear off neatly at 4 1/2 inches wide. There is a pocket flap on the inside front cover. This notebook also has an elastic riveted to the back cover which can be slipped around the front to hold the notebook closed.

The Hot Chocolate line offers Binders, Composition Books, Folders, Journals, Notebooks, and Writing utensils in a lot of color options in two basic patterns, stripes and big polka dots. The stripes come in three basic color schemes: pink, brown and green. The polka dot covers are multi-colored large dots on backgrounds of blue, orange, pink, black and brown. The designs are youthful and attractive. They are copyright designs by Jacqueline Savage McFee. You can see all the designs at U:Create.

Things I particularly like about this product are:

- The rounded outer corners. The page corners don't get as banged up when they are already rounded.

- The spiral is good quality, actually not a spiral at all, but a wire bent so that two loops of wire go through every hole

- The holes in the paper are squares, and large enough that the pages turn easily on the wire binding.

The only negative things I noted about this product are:

- The elastic is very soft and will give out quickly, but will probably last as long as an 80 page notebook.

- The rivets in the back cover had made dimples in the front covers of every book in the store (from being packed tightly in their packing case. If you wanted to give this as a gift, this might be an issue.