How to Make a Junk Journal | Step-by-step process & my top tips ✨

hey it's meg welcome back to my channel so today i have a junk journal tutorial for you guys which is long awaited and much requested so i'm going to show you how i create my a6 junk journals these are really beginner friendly and it's just one simple binding method and that you can replicate for as thick as you want your journal to be so this one you can see here has four signatures and this one and i've done a bit of a hidden sort of binding but this one has three signatures so totally up to you how chunky you want your journal to be um but you can basically just sort of replicate this method however thick you want so you can have two signatures or four signatures um it's totally up to you and you can totally use what you have around the house so i'll show you what i have collected to use in the one we're gonna make today but aside from the papers you will need a sewing needle something to sew with i use embroidery thread purely because about five years ago now i went to a charity shop and they had an absolute job lot of embroidery thread and i'm still working my way through it so that's why i use embroidery thread just because i have so much of it to hand and but you could totally use any sort of string or um i wouldn't really recommend cotton because that might be a bit too thin but as long as it's you know sturdy enough that it's not gonna sort of tear um that would be good and then obviously some scissors in terms of papers so a staple of my skunk journals is always tea dyed papers and there's several tutorials on how to tea dye papers if you don't know how to do it already and i'll link some down below but essentially i have just taken um printer paper and also some graph paper just from a pad and and just t dyed it so really simple and they dry really quickly if you want your papers to be less wrinkly you could lay them under a heavy book just to flatten them out a bit but i think it adds nice and texture to our journal what i want you to do is go through your stash of papers and books um or maybe go to like a charity shop thrift shop um and you'll find some really cheap just like books and different things like that that you can use um doesn't really matter what's in them because we're obviously going to create on top of them anyway um so i just have these scraps of um i don't even know what these are something that i've tea dyed previously and these are some floral book illustrations and this here so when you get an old book from the charity shop the um end papers at the front and the back of the book will typically have plain paper that is also kind of naturally aged rather than the tea dyed um so they're really nice to use and these are also normally quite sturdy as well and then just lots of different sort of book pages i've put this in here just to show you so this is an old um book page from gosh i think this is literally 1915 and it looks really pretty however as you can hear it's really thin so um i would just be really mindful when you are collecting your papers to make sure that you've got papers that are thick enough because once i fold this as we will do for um when we come to bind the journal it won't be as strong and you might find that it'll tear and fall out of your book so something like this quite flimsy um i wouldn't really use um but you can obviously use that when you come to doing ephemera and actual journaling but for page integrity make sure you've got like nice thick pages and typically a lot of old book pages are quite thick anyway um so they're like these are really good to use you can hear they're quite thick um again go to the back of your book don't ignore that particularly you'll find the planar sort of sections or even just the indexes that have really nice text that would be nice for backgrounds and i've got music sheet again some more this is a little bit more flimsy so this is more sort of uh printer paper sort of thickness which you can still use and but you can hear the difference between this is almost a bit like newspaper whereas even printer paper is still a lot better so and if you're using printer paper you can certainly tea dye that like i have done and use that in your journal as well and yeah i just use lots of book pages and typically i'll pick out different pages from different books just so that we've got some variety in different shapes and sizes textures and even just like the colors of the aged papers because i like to work with a lot of neutrals um so even just like a variety of neutrals um is really nice to work with and then i just thought i'd show you here so this is a book i picked up recently from a charity shop and just to kind of show you what i would be looking for in a book if i went to a charity shop um so this is obviously quite a big size so i normally make a six journals and but if you're looking even to make a five journals then you'll typically want to try and find bigger books like bigger than a5 so when you come to fold the pages you've still got um a decent page um within your journal when it's split in half and so i typically go to the gardening section just because i like um botanicals and florals but and like i said front papers tend to have really nice thick papers that we can use and this one i don't know if it will pick it up this one's actually really textured as well so i think that's really nice so i'm probably going to use that um and then nothing too precise just rip it out you want to stray away from anything that's too shiny this is a little bit shiny as you can see but it's not it's not really high gloss like a magazine would be you want to look for things that are going to be um matte um and easy to work on top of that's not to say you can't put gesso on top of these pages um like clear gesso white gesso and but i think it just makes it a lot easier if they're already matte to begin with um so illustrations like this i really love so i'm gonna just tear this one out and it's not coming out as smoothly as i thought it would um but as you can see because we've got a decent sized piece of paper once i fold this in half and as we will do in a minute you can see that that page has retained a lot of the illustration on it so what we're going to do now is fold our papers in half and it's literally as simple as folding them in half and but you want to be wary obviously which direction you fold them in depending on what you want to show for this one i folded it this way rather than the other way because i wanted the illustration to go all the way down so i'm going to fold all my papers just in half and then i will be right back [Music] so once i've folded all my papers as you can see here um i'm now going to go and sort them just into categories so i'm going to put my base pages which are like my plain tea dye pages and anything that doesn't have a lot of visual interest um over in this section and then i'm going to put ones that are sort of smaller pages in another section and these have visual interests so we'll stick them there that's plain again visual interest and these are kind of like book pages it's plain more book pages um these are kind of more standout pages so i'm going to put them in their own separate section because these are almost a bit like embellishment pages i'm gonna put them in a separate pile [Music] so once i've got my sections laid out i can then go ahead and build my signatures so i think for this journal i'm going to do three signatures and what i do is it's a bit like a pick and mix so a bit from here a bit from here a bit from here so i'll start off with um the base layers so i might pick maybe a couple of these and typically i do about 10 sheets of paper per signature but it does depend on the thickness of your paper so you might want to adjust that depending on um like i say how thick the papers that you're using are so i'm just going to pick sort of a variety of um planar pages um i think might do four and so i've got a grid paper a sort of vanilla color this textured paper which is really nice um and then just a teaspoon tea stained paper and i might put two of those in actually so i will just grab these and put them in maybe an order like this and this bit you can really play around with how pages are sitting with each other so there we are we've got our five plain pages and then what i'm gonna do is go to my should we call it like a buffet of papers um and then i might pick one small piece and i'm just gonna sort of go through and see what do i think that it would match with what do i think that it would um go well with so i think it might pair nicely with this um and my edges are kind of ripped but i think that adds to the effect of the journal so um i'm gonna pop that one there so that makes six sheets um i'm gonna let's have some of the um visual interest so i might do a music sheet and um one of these book pages perhaps this one and this one and then you'll see here that i've got more pages than i have um that i'm gonna have signatures um but that's fine um you can always then make sort of extra journals from this i just like to have more to choose from it's better to have more to choose from and then to kind of be scrabbling around for things so give yourself lots of choice and when you're picking out your papers and then you can just sort of sit and decide what's going to look best so pop this one here and we will come in and obviously um trim this off um but for now i'm just sort of looking and seeing i think this is looking quite nice and i tend to have contrasting pages i think they look quite nice so um you'll see here sort of the manila against the white and then the textured or plainer papers against something that does have interest so when i come in with this piece for example i'm just going to literally eyeball it um no measuring over here and then just tear that i'm going to pick somewhere that obviously doesn't have any interest and slot it in here so i'm just going to trim oops that's wonky trim this myself just so that i can see what's going on and then i typically add one or two of the like visual interest pieces um throughout the pages so we will put this one let's see i quite like that manila this has got text on the other side so we want to be mindful of that i think it's gonna go nicely here and then you've got the text with the plane then and then one from the visual interest page so i will go with let's go with this one so what i'm going to do is just line this up to where the top of the page is and then just fold it like so and then just tear it and don't don't bend these scraps obviously and we can keep those for later and then i think this will look really nice on the front of this signature so what i'm gonna do is pop this here i'm gonna use the a6 piece of tea stained paper because i know that that is true a6 because it was obviously halved and halved again from a4 and i'm just gonna use that as my guide um when it comes to sizing down all my papers so what you'll want to end up with is something that is uniform like this and i've just tucked them into now but i'm probably going to trim them up so what i'm going to do is make another two of these inserts and then i'll be back to show you how we're going to bind them [Music] so [Music] so once you have as many signatures as you want for your journal the next step is to create the cover and the spine so i'm just going to use some scrapbook paper for the cover what we want to do with this is cut it to the size of the cover so i'm just going to hold this up here so to allow for some bulk you will want to make this um slightly larger than your pages and i will cut this one just because obviously it's the cover so we want that to be nice and i'm just going to use this as a guide for my back piece [Music] so for my cover what i have done is i've taken two pieces of scrapbook paper and trimmed them down to the size of the cover and then i have put in between as the spine and reinforced tea dyed paper so a couple of sheets glued together and just so that we've got that flexibility but then also um sturdiness and i've just glued that together here with um just a pritt stick and then what i'm gonna do is just reinforce it with some tape um and then i'll obviously be doing um end papers so you won't see this for some extra um sturdiness i guess there we go so it doesn't look very pretty but um you're not going to see most of it anyway and that's glued down there and then you can see when we pop these inside um it looks something like that and i've cut these two too long so i'm probably gonna need to trim these um so the next step is to sew the signatures into the journal so now we're gonna bind our signatures into our cover and all you're gonna need is your thread and a bulldog clip just to hold your pages in place some scissors and then obviously a needle and a good way of knowing how much thread you're going to need for what you're binding and with this method is to just grab your thread like this and just count one two three and then a little bit oops a good look and then just chop that so that's how much we're gonna need that should be more than enough and then we'll just try and thread this through the needle like so okay and then you don't need to tie it on the end because we're only going to go through three times so you should be okay um so obviously leave yourself a bit of a tail here and then grab your clip and what you'll want to do is find your center page and you'll want to make sure everything's lined up neatly and where you want it and then you'll just want to clip like this just so that nothing moves whilst you're trying to sew so this method it's really simple um you can measure if you want to be precise but i don't think you have to so essentially we're going to make three holes in each of the signatures so the first hole you're going to want to make is dead center if you hold the journal closed a little bit um it helps you to push through and then we're going to want one that's about maybe an inch or so uh up from the top about here so there's two and i just find making these before we go into the sewing um whoops is a lot easier so then we're going to make another one and again it's going to be in a similar position to the one we just made here and three so there we've got our three holes so make sure that your signature is the right way up make sure that your cover the right way up that you want it to be and then we are going to start with the middle hole so go back through the hole you just poked which should be easy now that we've poked it through pull your thread through until it reaches about the edge of your page and just hold it there with your thumb just so that it doesn't move anywhere then you come to your cover um you can pre-poke and pre-measure these holes um if you want but i just hold it to just in the front of the cover like this and then just match it up with the middle hole um poke and go through and then [Music] come back round come to your second hole through we've come around and poke where you want your second hole to be there and then come around back and then through the back of this hole and make sure you don't lose this end here and then i'm going to come around come through this hole here and then poke the hole in lines with the ones you've got here just here pull through and then once you're through on this side come back inside the middle hole again make sure you've got enough thread to come through come through the middle hole again so you pop out here and you might need to pull the thread round just so that you can have enough to pull through and then come through this middle hole here and back through where we started and then you'll just want to pull that through you can take off your needle now we don't need that and then what you'll want to do is pull this tight so make sure that you've not got any loops here make sure that it's all flush and then pull this now don't pull it up you want to pull it this way so pull it across the spine like this to make sure that it's taut and then tie a good few knots just to make sure that this is not going to come out and then once you've tied a few knots you can snip off the ends and i wouldn't snip it right here and maybe leave yourself a little bit just in case i'm not there that's your first signature sewn in and then you'll just want to repeat that then for the other two signatures that we've got now that our journal is bound and has all of the signatures inside what i'm going to do is just tidy up these end pages and i'm just going to use again another piece of scrapbook paper just for that structural integrity and what i'll choose is probably something to complement the cover so quite like these spots and i'm simply just going to go ahead and measure up where that will be and you don't want to butt up right against the edge because you'll probably find then that it might um it might warp so do leave yourself a little bit of room just for the journal to grow and then you can glue it down so i'll just grab my glue stick and just glue all along the side here and on the inside and then pop that in and just make sure that the edges are lined up like so and then we will just cut this to size so there we have it there is the finished journal and all of the journal pages inside ready to be used so i hope you've enjoyed this tutorial and that you found it useful don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss when i post another video and if you'd like to see even more of my journals then follow me over on instagram and i will see you guys in the next video [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: megjournals

Views: 146,504

Rating: 4.9446125 out of 5

Keywords: how to make a journal, junk journal tutorial, how to make a junk journal, journal binding tutorial, easy junk journal diy

Id: CDKbQ9e2KCY

Length: 25min 38sec (1538 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021