I made a personalized notebook for my great niece using a 1inch notebook with a plastic overlay. I purchased these at Sam's Club. I think they were either a 4 pack or 6 pack...can't remember but they end up being less than $2.00 each.
I used a free program from Kodak to make the page and printed it on photo paper from my printer. She is crazy about horses and one of the pages happened to have a horse theme. I purchased a nice 5 pen package of roller writers from Office Depot for less than $4.00.
Inside the notebook I added a writing pad, some notebook paper and some page protectors.