Easy Junk Journal Idea Book from Old Recycled Book - Part 1

hi friends welcome back to my channel this is Sharon from Med paper crush and today I'm gonna be starting a new series where we're working in an old book to create a journal for ideas so you may have seen other people do this I've been wanting to do this for a while I just want to have a journal that I'm not gonna journal in but I'm going to keep my ideas for different journals in so how I do the pages what kind of tags I make you know what tuck spots and pockets and you know different things that you can put into a journal I kind of wanted to start an idea book to start collecting those because as I start new journals I always want to go back and look and see what I might want to do or what I might be inspired by so I'm gonna make this idea journal from an old book so today you're gonna be watching part one where we prep the spine and the cover of a book that you may have lying around and then we put our signatures together so let's go ahead and jump in alright to do this pretty simple project you're definitely gonna need a book and I just found this book which is the best-loved poems of the American people there are no pictures or anything it has some great torn edge papers which I will definitely be using for other things the signatures are glued in this one not sewn so I'll probably you know have to use them just one side a lot of times if they're sewn I like to be able to use the full page of this signature to fold in another journal or something but these will still be very useful now I picked this book because number one I like the cover and I didn't want to get too crazy doing this cover since this is just going to be an idea a journal a place where I can keep different ideas and inspiration for different journals and things that I want to make I wanted something plain but my other sort of requirement was that I wanted something pretty thick because I want to be able to put as many ideas in here as I can and I wanted to be able to have something that would expand as I continue to get different ideas and want to put different things in here so this spine is about about two inches wide and while you know I maybe could have found something bigger I think this so this will be good for now so it's bigger than most of the other books that I found but still big enough for you know for me to put a bunch of ideas in it so and then the book itself is just about a little over five and a half inches wide by just about eight and a half inches tall so I wanted to also find something where I could take a u.s. piece of paper fold it in half and have it fit in here so we might have to you know rethink the height of the papers but I'm not too concerned about that right now I'm gonna see how it works out so the other things that you need I'm going to use this is was sold as a muslin but it's pretty thick it's kind of a heavier weight muslin than some of the other ones that I've gotten so if you have like a canvas or something like that that might be good to use this is going to be for the inside of the spine to reinforce it a bit for us to put our things on and then I'm also going to be using a exacto knife here to cut out the signatures from the middle of the book I might need a bone folder just to kind of you know push the fabric down and make sure I've gotten everything in the nooks and crannies there I may need some scissors to tear this fabric or cut this fabric as well and then some of the other things that I'm going to be using I'm going to be using my crop-a-dile with the three-eighths inch eyelets because I think what I'm going to do because of the size of this spine and the way I'd like this idea journal to work is I want to have five signatures three of them I'm going to sew in and two of them I'm going to use as elastics so that I can pull the whole signature out so that I can add stitch or you know different things that may be harder to do if the signature was actually sewn into the book so I wanted to kind of leave my options open for the signatures so I'm going to be using these eyelets to create the elastics here that I'm going to be using and then the other thing that you'll need is some thread so and I use I use this nylon thread I just seemed to like it so I'm going to be using that nylon thread to sew in the signatures that I'm actually sewing in and for that I usually also have some beeswax to make the nylon a little less slick so that it holds better as it's going through the papers and then you'll need some needles of course to sew your signatures in and that might be that might be it for what we're going to do so let's go ahead and get started alright let's go ahead and get the pages out of this book now you've probably seen this done a lot of different ways and a lot of different times probably so I'm just gonna go through it pretty quickly what I like to do is open up the book and kind of separate the signatures from the spine as much as I can and then taking my exacto knife just very carefully going down the inside edge and the reason I say carefully is because I want to be able to use the spine as it is I don't want to have to cover the back of the spine which certainly you could if the spine was already cut or if you accidentally went through it you could cover the spine with fabric or something else so but I want I'd like to try to use this spine as is if I can so that came out pretty easily you can see there and then I'm just going to do the same thing to the back part here and since it's already pulled away I'm going to try and get it away as much as possible because I will say in the past I have hooked through the spine with my exacto knife you know causing a hole so you don't want to you don't want to do that if you don't have to so there's my book block I'm just gonna go ahead and put this aside because right now we're not going to use it and now we have our cover and this is exactly what I was hoping it would be so because it's in pretty good shape all I'm going to do is reinforce the insides a little bit now before I put the fabric down that I'm going to so I was just going to use some of this fabric to reinforce the spine I am going to just try to cut down some of the insides here now you can use your big scissors I think I'm going to try some littler scissors because I just want to pull away as much of this leftover paper and spine material as I can so just do your best here and the fabric is going to cover it up but I figure a cleaner edge might be a little bit easier to work with so and once again just be careful that you're not cutting through you know the edge of your spine causing the creating a hole there and you could probably use your craft knife if you felt comfortable enough to do that like I said I really am trying to be careful so I don't want to do something that might cause this to break apart I think I did okay alright so let's clean up our mess here and then we are just going to go ahead and get this fabric ready to go down so I like the idea of maybe having it extend a little bit above and below my book just to kind of give it a more rugged look now once again this is going to be an idea journal but I think an idea journal should be just as inspiring as a gern you might make for you know to give away or to use for yourself for journaling so that being said I'm gonna try to use things and do things with it that I would do in any other journal just to keep it inspirational so all I'm gonna do here is I'm going to just kind of eyeball this from the top and the bottom and actually like I love the way it's torn on this edge and because I'm probably gonna cover the front and back with papers I'm just going to I think I'm gonna turn it this way because I like how this is torn and then I'm gonna eyeball where I want to tear it at the bottom so I have it maybe a quarter to a half of an inch above the top there and then I'm gonna get my scissors out and just mark kind of where that's gonna be down here and then we'll I just put a little quarter of an inch snip in there and then I'm going to give it a tear so I love fabrics that you can tear like that okay so let's see how we did here okay all right I guess it really doesn't matter which side I use since I'm just gonna cut now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to allow the fabric to go over about an inch on to the back and front covers so that we have enough to go down inside and then come up over on to the on to the back in front of the cover so and maybe I might even go a little bit more than an inch because I want to be sure that as I push it down into the spine itself that we still have a nice amount of fabric over on each side to hold it in place real well and and give it some stability so now this one because I'm going to cover with paper I'm just gonna go ahead and cut this one up to the top there and I like that these fabrics okay so now what we're going to do is we're just going to get rid of some of these stray the threads on the side because as we cover it with paper we don't want that the sides to be that bulky so I'm just gonna trim some of those off to make sure they're not real bulky when we get to that point okay so this is what I want I have to decide which side I want facing out in which side I want facing up looks like I missed some on this side I think we're good okay so now I'm just going to use my glue my fabric glue and I'm going to glue just the middle to start with so I'm going to glue down the middle and I'm not going all the way to the edge because I kind of liked the idea of the top and bottom frayed edges sort of not being attached to the spine so I'm just going up to about a quarter of an inch above and now what I'm gonna do is take this fabric and in half so that I kind of know where the middle is and then I'm going to eyeball putting it down in the middle and then letting it fall open here and as I can see I didn't quite do that very well but that's okay all right so let's go ahead and we're just going to make sure it is press down in the middle nice and flat and then I'm going to make sure the edges are in here now here's where if you would like to use a bone folder you could just to make sure it's flat but then also into the edges as much as possible okay I think that's looking pretty good okay and now I am going to because this is really uneven boy I did a pretty bad job there I think what I'm going to do is just trim the sides down a little bit so that when they stick out of the top and bottom they will stick out evenly so this one must not have been a square piece of fabric so I'm just going to try to cut this one and make it straighter that looks better and this one this side looks pretty straight but it's much bigger than this side so I am just gonna trim this down a little bit so that they the size matches a little bit better and that looks pretty good so now I'm down to about an inch which is pretty much what I wanted on both sides there okay so the glue now is pretty dry on the inside we can go ahead and glue the outside edges down and I'm just going to kind of make sure I have some right along the edge and then out about that inch here and once again we're going to be covering this with papers so it doesn't have to be perfect but we do want it as flat as possible on both sides so I'm just going to go ahead and do both sides here and I'm trying to make sure I'm not pulling the fabric out of my little notches here on the side of the spine so that we still have a nice range of motion to close and open the book when it's done here so and now I'm just going to go back and anything I've missed towards the outside edge I'm just gonna try to get glued down there side as well but actually this one looks pretty good I'll be just a little on the edge here okay and once you feel like you have everything glued down really well and all of your nooks and crannies kind of priests and put into place we can go ahead and put this aside to dry okay Wow my book cover is drying I decided to get together some pages for the signatures so this is totally subjective you can do whatever you want here I'm just gonna kind of show you what I've brought together for this so the first thing that I have is just a bunch of envelopes so some of this is junk mail envelopes that I'm you know trying to recycle some of these are just some tea dyed note card envelopes and then I also have these brand-new vellum envelopes so I wanted to put one of those in there and once again I'm trying to have a different variety of things in my idea book so that I can always be inspired or remember maybe what I did at one time or something like that so then the next thing that I have is book pages so I love including book pages in my book I especially love using book pages from the book that I'm using in the cover so because the book that I'm using for this cover is glued and not sewn in here I may find a way to incorporate some of these pages you know by collage or something like that but they're really not going to go into the book the way I really want them to so I probably won't use them in the actual pages of the signature that we're putting together so this is these are some book pages from a relatively old book this one I think it was from the seventies or early 80s or something like that so it's just flowering shrubs but I love the way it looks they're very sturdy pages so they'll sew in Nice using a whole you know page from one of the signatures in there so I pulled a couple of these out this one has a little bit of tear so I might you know reinforce that but this is also a good example of you know ways you can be sure you can use your book pages and things even if you know they don't come to you perfectly and then I have you know just a third one here so a couple of book pages and then I also have some book pages with no pictures so this is another book that is relatively old it has a nice feel for the paper I was able it was a sown signature book so I was able to pull these out nicely to be able to use in the book so I pulled a couple of those out cuz I thought they would be fun and for whatever reason I love the title the parasite may sound you know I don't know weird to people but that's me I kind of like that and then because this is an idea book I wanted it to be relatively plain so I pulled out just a bunch of different coffee dyed papers and I forget how many I have here but I have a whole bunch and they're different different shades they're just from you know my old stack things that maybe didn't get coffee died too well you know I'm just kind of putting all of these in here but and the reason I'm not putting in any white pages in here is because I like the vintage look that's kind of what I'm into right now so I wanted to keep this kind of vintage style throughout so everything's you know coffee dyed or aged itself in here and then I also grabbed some scrapbook paper just from you know different scrapbook packs and different things that I have so I have some cardstock so some heavier paper now all of this I have tea dyed or coffee died as well but I have some card stock and I like for this one I cut it down to about eight and a half inches tall so that it would fit into the book this was a twelve by twelve piece but it kept all my scraps of course so this was this size page and I cut it down so that it would fit in there but then like I have this one that I just cut down actually to 11 inches so that maybe we could fold it up and create a pocket for the page so I did a couple of those where I just cut them down to the length I figured we could use them in different ways and then some other ones that I once again cut down to 8 and a half tall to make sure they fit in to the book okay but I have all different different things to do there and then I also grab some coffee dyed lined paper so this is just some composition notebook and then some loose leaf papers from different notebooks and things like that that have been coffee guide that I thought would be fun to include and then I have a couple more book pages that I wanted to include I have this giant book of castles and I just I absolutely love it so I have been pulling pages out of it I just cut this one down because you know this was the the full signature but I can't well I mean I'm sure I could figure out a way to get it into the journal attached but I wanted to cut it apart so that I could make sure to take advantage of the pictures as much as possible but these have lots of wording on the other side so they'll be good to add things to the pages for my idea book and then I have these these are more sort of flowering plants this is another book that I have that I really love it has all sorts of illustrations but then some color bits throughout that I really love and once again some words but I'm good with that because I know I'll be covering them up but I just love the the different colors on these pages so I grabbed a couple of those and then I also have an old ledger most not that old I think it's maybe from the 60s I think if there's any dates on here oh no 59 so yeah I'm pretty old so I just took a couple of pages out of there as well as I thought this would make a fun addition to my idea book so that's all I grabbed what I've decided to do is five signatures and so I think I have enough pages do seven pages per signature which is kind of a lot but I'm gonna see how how I think it's going to work out so now that I pulled them all all of these pages that I think I'm going to use I'm going to separate them out into signatures and I'll just put this on fast motion so you can kind of see what I do to put them into signatures and get them ready to go [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so I kinda have all my signatures together and these pieces are really big so I'll just kind of show you what I have so for each one what I do is I lay out my first piece my first page for each signature in a pile so that I know okay I have my five signatures set out so one two three four or five and then I just try to distribute all the different pages I've pulled out to kind of make them even throughout you know the entire book so I have like for this signature I have a flowering page I have one scrapbook page I have a book page they're one lined page and then three blank pages and then these two envelopes which I'm going to create sort of one small page from as well so that's kind of one signature and they're mostly the same but I had only pulled out four of those castle pages so like this one will have a castle page even though that other signature did not and it'll have one of those scrapbook paper this one has two book pages since I had six of those lined paper plain paper and just a plain envelope and like not even all of them got an envelope so this one has the ledger paper instead of a castle page and then the flowering scrapbook page one book page in that one and then some other book pages here so I think they all should have close to seven and I'm okay with it you know one has one more one has one less I'm good with you know what we have there because like these envelopes will make but things bunch up a little and things as well so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to fold them all so that I get my signatures together because I'm kind of happy with where they're at I want to go ahead and fold all the signatures so before I do that though I just wanted to tell you kind of how I was gonna fold some of the pages since this is an idea book we can get some ideas from it so I'm gonna pull out with you pull out this signature so for example this envelope which is a standard I think number 10 envelope I'm just going to leave it open because I'm going to use it to tuck things into to have some pockets in there so all I'm gonna do is fold this in half so that when it goes in my signature I will have a small envelope on either side to add things to now a lot of times what I like to do with envelopes like this that have a big slap across here is to go ahead and cut them so that they so easier together so you want the flap to be able to be usable when it goes into the signature so if it's sewn down not cut you're not going to be able to open it up so I'm just going to try to mimic the angle on this side it's gonna be close but not you know it's not gonna be perfect and I'm okay with that because the other thing is even when it's cut you'd like it to be pulled away from the edge of the page that it's next to so that it opens and closes easily and actually hit this one I think I might need to cut down just a teeny bit more on the inside of this one so that it doesn't get caught in the middle of the signature there okay so this one so that's kind of what I'm gonna do with my envelopes and I will probably do the same thing with this one although you know what let's do this one a little bit different so this is gonna be for this signature this is gonna be for my other signature but let me show you how I'm gonna do this one this one I think I'm actually going to close the envelope so this had some wording on it that I just covered up with like a this is like a stamp that you know hides words from you a security stamp I think it's called but I didn't want to show that so I'll probably be covering that or you know adding something else to it later but what I'm gonna do with this one is I am going to close it and I think I'm just gonna use my I can probably just use some glue stick here and I want to be sure that I'm just using the glue stick where the gummed portion might have been so I'm only going in maybe a quarter to a half of an inch here because I don't want to glue the whole thing shut I just want to make sure I have the flap glued down so now we've closed off this envelope and to make it usable inside of our journal because we are gonna fold this one as well what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take my page trimmer and very gently trim off just like an eighth of an inch on either side because then when we fold it in half and sew it inside the journal we'll have a different kind of envelope pocket inside there and it doesn't seem like this flu wants to hold right there so let me grab my glitter glue didn't hold for me but go ahead and just make sure this is down all right let's try that again now I have a tube and when I take my tube and fold it in half and stitch it in now we'll have a side pocket envelope so I'm just going to fold this in half and now when I sew it in I'll have these little fun little side pockets to go in here so I think that's fun too and then I might as well do the last envelope with you that I'm thinking about doing kind of a different way so this envelope I have two envelopes to make one signature so basically what I'm gonna do with this one is slide one flap in to the other and glue them together so that it kind of becomes one inside pocket envelope so you can see now when I sew this in my pockets will be on the inside here so I have several different you know pockets on the outside pockets on the inside and then flip pockets that kind of even look like little envelopes that are gonna go in the signature so after you kind of slide those together you can glue them down now I think what I may do though is leave this flap open because once again I have this idea journal and I think this would be a good flap to do something else with so I don't know exactly what that might be right now but I'm just going to glue this side down on the inside of this one to put it together so that I can get it into the signature now this may be one of those that I leave in my signature that's not sewn so that I can pull it out and do more with it later but that's kind of what I want to do with this one so I'm just going to add some glue and we'll see how easy this is sometimes I find it hard to slide things into other envelopes and get them glued down properly so let's see if I can do this on camera and get it together that wasn't too bad I wanted to make sure I get it all the way to the edge so that's pretty good so what I'm just gonna do is I'm gonna take my bone folder just make sure it's kind of touching there and going to glue nicely for me so so there we go we still have our flap over here but I may use that for something I think that would be something cool to add on to this one after we you know get our journal put together so I'm going to leave that one like that what signature I had that one on okay now the only other things that I wanted to mention before I go ahead and fold the rest of this stuff in half because the regular eight and a half by 11 sheets I'm probably just going to fold in half although you could do different things with these two you could fold them not quite in half and then you could fold over you know to make a an inside pocket or something like that on them if you wanted to but the ones that are bigger like this one for instance what I want to do is I want to fold it at the halfway mark and then do that you know fold over so that I can either make a pocket or a tuck spot or something with that extra piece that's sticking out so so you don't always have to cut them down perfectly to size which you know I kind of like as well so I am gonna get my scoreboard out because it's easier to measure and score right away [Music] it's too small okay so what I'm gonna do is so this one I think this is looks like it's probably about 13 inches or maybe even 13 and a half inches tall so what I'm gonna do is fold at what I know is the halfway mark now what I might do just to be sure because my cover was about five and a half inches I may fold a little bit less than five and a half inches to be sure that once I get all my signatures in there and they sit against the spine that they're not necessarily pushing out you know across the edge so I want to I'm gonna do this at 1/8 below the five and a half mark so that'll be five and three-eighths that I'm going to score at I'm gonna use the bigger side of my scoring here so I'm just going to try to score without going off the rails which I kind of did in the beginning there but let me do that again this is pretty thick ledger paper which I absolutely love but you have to score it a couple times to make sure you get a nice crease there okay so now I can fold this in half and I have my you know this is the part that will sew into the journal and then I have this little bit left over that I could make a tuck spot or a pocket or something like that so now I don't need to I don't need to measure it anymore because I know where the edge needs to be I don't want to go any further than that so I could go right to the edge or in a little bit which I am probably going to go in a little bit so I like to be a little bit more safe than sorry on something like that but now you can see this is going to be my page with my ledger book and I didn't even have to cut it down but certainly if you have wonderful these are like I said these are such wonderful pages if you had something like that and you did cut it off this would be great for a collage or a tag or even a separate pocket in and of itself you know in the journal by itself so all right so now the other page that I had that might be a little bit now that's not one might be a little bit might wonder what I'm doing with it so let me grab one of the other signatures real quick I'm trying to keep them all together okay so this was the signature where we had that envelope that we made and I have this piece of paper that I cut down to a little bit less than 11 inches tall or I'm sorry this is gonna be wide so it's going to go into the into my journal like this but then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to fold it up to create a pocket on the bottom so let me show you what I mean so that I'm making making more sense so I have my width as a little bit less than 11 so my book is about five and a half inches wide I know that my pages I don't really want them to be any longer than 11 inches so that when they're folded in half they'll fit inside the cover nicely so I've cut this one down just a little bit less than 11 inches so that I know that I will be able to do that successfully so now Heights because my cover is only going to be eight and a half inches only goes up to here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a mark and actually since I want this to be the top I'm going to put this as a zero and then I know that my book is eight and a half inches tall once again I'm just going to go 1/8 inch below that so I'm going to make my score mark at 8 and 3/8 inches on this side all the way down and this is lighter scrapbook paper even pride than that ledger but I'm still just going to do a couple of marks to make that work the way I wanted to and whenever you score you want to fold the opposite direction so I've made like a dip a valley and I want to fold to make that a hill so I'm just gonna fold this up like this so now you can see we'll have a perfect place to make a little pocket in our signature once we fold this in half so I'm gonna fold this in half to kind of show you what it will look like inside the book so now when it goes this will be my where I sew in the signature and then I will have these two pockets on either side that I can you know either sew or glue or something like that so that's another neat little trick that you can do when you have your papers that aren't the exact sizes of your book so now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and fold the rest of my pages for my signatures to get them all together and I'll probably be doing a combination of all of these things that we had seen here as I go so I'm gonna start folding if you have yours ready to go I hope that you'll start folding and I'll see you back here when you're done [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay signatures are all folded and I haven't put them together yet because I just wanted to go through that as well but I have everything folded and separated into my five signatures here so what I'm gonna do now let me just put these aside and I'll just kind of stack them so that they stay separated for me is what now we'll put them together in the order that I want them to go into the journals so to do that I just kind of spread things out and then I just try to put things you know in a way that's varied if that makes any sense so first I just pick what I want the outside of my signature to be so I like this one I'm going to put this one in I have three kind of plain papers plus the scrap of paper that's kind of plain so I kind of want to separate them all out if I can or a little bit it doesn't have to be totally separated but I'm going to go ahead and put this lined one in next and then this scrap of paper that has a fold on it that I can use for a tuck or a little pocket on the side here and then maybe I will put in this book page and then I will put put this one in and then my line one and then maybe I will put in my ledger page and that's not the way it goes and then my final page there so here is one signature in the order that I want it to go all ready to go so I'm gonna do the same thing with the rest of my signatures and just get them all into the order that I want to have them in [Music] okay just a couple quick notes about my signatures I must have miscounted because I've had some extra pages that I just it seemed like there was probably too much in here and there may even still be too much in here because this is already feeling like it's getting past two inches and once I start adding more things in there it might even be too much so at this point I may even go back and pull out some more of the pages so that I have a little bit less inside with the pages and more space to add you know to the book as I start putting in the different ideas and the other thing one I wanted to mention is this signature I must not have cut the page down so I think this one is still 12 inches long so I'm just gonna go back and make sure that you know all of my pages are the right length and things so before I do that though I just wanted to grab the cover so that we could kind of start getting an idea of what's gonna happen here so I do need to cut down that one signature but you can see here as I put all the signatures in they line up just about perfectly except for that one that I have to cut down and the size the top and bottom is also really good I have a feeling that like most journals I'll have some stuff sticking out the top and out the sides as after we go tabs and you know tech styles and different things like that but you can see this signature when I lay it down actually you probably can't see from that side but when I lay it down it doesn't look completely flat it is already you know starting to alligator out a bit for me there so I may go through and just pull out another one or two pages from each signature to lighten the load just a little bit so that I have more room to add things to the journal after I get it completed so I'm gonna cut that down and then I'm going to pull out a couple of those pages and then we'll be ready for the next step [Music] so now I'm just gonna go through and I'm gonna count them cuz I didn't even do that before so I'm gonna count how many pages I have in each one and normally when I count I don't count the envelopes or the small size pages they do add bulk obviously but I don't count them as part of my my page count so I'm just going to say this is 1 2 3 4 5 6 so and because I have some cardstock and things like that in some of these I think 6 is probably the max that I want to have for each one of the signatures and depending on how many pages are in there I may take out so I'm going to make them so that I have at least 5 or 6 signatures in each one okay I have taken some pages out and I have made sure everything was cut down nicely and now the signatures are all ready to go the last thing I do before I would put them into a journal is kind of decide what order I want them in so because they're pretty much the same even though they're in a different order I will just decide you know which ones I want first and this is just how I do it but what I try to do is you know like these two are kind of dark so I may just you know put these in between some of the other ones so I'll have that one go last this one will go after this one and then I'll have this one in here so if that's just how I do it it's you know kind of a random way to do it but you can do whatever you want here so as I think about what pages will be you know back up against each other that's kind of you know what I'm thinking about so you know this was a light page against a dark page and I like that but you could do it any way you know that you wanted to alright I hope that you will join me next week for part 2 of putting together this idea journal for you to keep some inspiration and ideas in if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel if you aren't already I try to put videos out every week and I will see you next week have a great week friends bye bye

Channel: Mad Paper Crush

Views: 3,796

Rating: 4.9802957 out of 5

Keywords: idea book junk journal, junk journal ideas, junk journal idea book, junk journal tutorial, junk journal cover, recycled book projects, easy junk journal tutorial, junk journal signatures, making junk journal signatures, junk journal signature ideas, recycled book journals

Id: xWDiXSr8gyQ

Length: 47min 55sec (2875 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 14 2020