Making a Journal For Beginners - Step by Step Process

[Music] hey guys so I'm finally getting around to putting the voiceover onto this video it's a general process video that I filmed quite a while ago when I originally did the voiceover oh it's too quiet so I am finally getting around to read doing that so it's been a while since I film this video you'll have to forgive me if I forget exactly what I did but I'm just going to talk you through making a really easy um journal if you're a beginner and as you can see here I'm just using a packaging box this is a little biscuit box as my cover and the reason I'm doing this for this video is just as I said if you're a beginner this just is super easy because the cards really easy to work with it's accessible and as you can see the spines already made for us so the book is pretty much made and I know a lot of people like to do their covers this way and it's just a really easy way to get started so I just trimmed it down to a size for this video I just made it I think I made it six by four and now I'm just going to start covering it so I'm covering mine straightaway but if you wanted to you could definitely reinforce the spine more you can use like a fabric or a tape or like a book binding tape or something to reinforce it you could also layer it up to make it thicker but for the sake of this video I'm just going to cover it with some paper straight away and I'm just using PVA glue and you can see that I'm being a bit messy with it but I made this journal in like an hour or two just to film it for you guys so it's not perfect but it's quick and it's easy and it gives you the basics so I'm just covering it like this I'm trimming down the corners so that I can just wrap the paper around it just like you'd cover um like a workbook at school and then I'm just going to glue those little side bits down again I'm just using PVA glue I like to use PVA glue because it's strong I trust it it works with material it works with paper works with wood so it's really versatile and yeah I just prefer to use glue I don't feel like tape is strong enough I don't know I just don't trust it I feel like after a while it gives so I always tend to use a wet glue like PVA and now I am going to I'm going to do I'm going to just fold really slowly and gently those creases refold them with the paper so that they don't tear it's really common for the paper to tear around the spine so you have to be really careful when you work with it and now I'm just picking a paper for the inside so it just shows this pretty pink paper and that's going to be in the inside lining of this book and then I have just trying to work out my measurements I think and I'm just going to cut down what do I cut two or three three pieces so two for the front and back and then one for the spine which I make slightly bigger than the spine so that it can cover over those creases some just um as you can see I don't really measure things exactly all the time I just kind of eyeball it and that works fine for me but you can definitely measure things exactly if that's how you feel comfortable so I'm sticking down the middle spine piece first that way the edges of it will be covered neatly with the front and back pieces in a moment and again I'm being really careful when I fold it but I haven't folded it all the way yet because I want that glue to set just a little bit otherwise the papers just going to slip right out of place and again I just want to say this is not perfect at all it's a bit messy the glue is not put on perfectly neatly hence getting on places that probably shouldn't be but it's okay for this video I yeah I just want to show you kind of a really quick step-by-step you can always change things to suit yourself and um add your own techniques and your own way of doing things so there I've just refolded it and I think I'm just going to set that to dry and I'm going to start making out my pages no I've let it dry and I'm going to come back and decorate it so okay so this is like a little chipboard frame that I had and I'm just kind of choosing what I'm going to put inside the frame so just got a couple of bits of scrap paper um and I end up going with this black and white one and then I'm just going to trace around the frame so I can cut that out so that it'll fit nicely behind it and this doesn't have to be perfect at all because the edges are going to be covered by the frame and you can cover your journal however you want to don't have to do it the way I do it you don't have to do it with paper or you can do it with fabric you can paint it you can do whatever you want the yeah the ideas are endless what you can do with the cover so this one's just super quick and I'm still using my PVA glue for pretty much everything so there's the cover and then I think I'm just going to set that down to dry properly and then I'm going to start working on the inside pages so oh no I'm not I'm wrong I'm sorry I'm going to add pockets first so I'm think I actually let the front of back basic covers of the book dry properly and then I came back to this so I didn't do all of this while it was wet because I wanted to just allow it to dry and um yeah you don't want to mess with it too much while that's drying so I did let it dry in between I did all of these steps but here I'm just adding a couple little tuck spot pockets to the front and back cover cover and as you can see um it's just like a little slip pocket so you coat you can't fit a lot in those pockets but you can slip something in there now I'm going to start working on the inside so for this journal I used all or almost all scrap papers that I had so I went into my scrap drawer and I just pulled out a bunch of scraps in pinks and Mint's for this particular book and as you can see they're all different sizes and they're all different weights of paper and all different patterns so I always um miss much paper lines whenever I make journals that's like the funnest part for me like picking papers that look good together so so for this book I chose a common color theme and now I'm just folding my papers in half and these are going to become the pages so for that for that particular page that I added some little tack pockets and after I folded these I'll neaten them up by trimming them down to size and cutting off all those jagged edges so they look nice all together and I don't think I even um chose a certain number of papers I just kind of pulled out a bunch but it ended up working out fine you can definitely pick and choose exactly how many pages you want your book to have or you can just kind of do it randomly I see a lot of people asking how many pages to put into signatures and it doesn't matter really it's completely up to you it's personal preference you can even do like three pages in a signature and then you can do ten if you wanted to there's no right or right or wrong way to do something so get creative with it okay so now I'm just going to go and trim down all my pages and make sure that they're not going to hang out the side of the book and I'm going to have some long pages and I'm going to have some shorter pages just depending on what size my scrap piece of paper was to begin with and I'm sorry about the video shaking like that it's because of the way my camera was set up on the table so when I was cutting my paper it was shaking my whole table which was shaking my camera so this is really simple a really really simple little journal I haven't done anything fancy with the pages I haven't made any envelopes or pockets or anything fancy I've just kind of got scrap pieces of paper and cut them down so there are my pages and now I'm going to go ahead and add a couple of a4 copy paper white pages and I had some colored ones left over so I just picked some pink and green and then some white ones and the reason I did this was because I wanted to make sure I had at least a few full-size pages so a lot of as I said a lot of the pages I had aren't full-sized they're shorter because our scraps and so I wanted to I wanted to give the book a little bit of a fuller look and make sure it had some four pages um spread throughout it so I think that's all the pages that I make for the inside and now I'm just going to start putting them into signatures so usually I like to stack them in two piles of types of pages or slides of the pages so here I'm putting them into like I've got my full-size sheets and I've got bigger scraps and I've got medium and then I've got tiny little ones so that just helps me to disperse those pages evenly throughout all of the signatures otherwise if I start putting all the full ones together I might run out of them and then at the end my books just going to like look a bit funny because I'm going to have little short pages at the end and no big ones so hopefully that makes sense but here I'm just popping them into their signatures so grabbing one or two from each pile so that those pages are dispersed nicely and then and then I'll start pinning them together so that I can bind it so you can be really careful about how you arrange your pages and really like put a lot of thought an organization into it but for this journal as you can see I'm just doing it pretty randomly and now I'm just going to put those signatures into into order so I've got them into an order I've counted how many I have I think it turned out to be ten by memory which is pretty convenient and now I'm going to start pinning those together so they don't move when I bind it and I'm actually using these really large bobby pins so you can use paper clips you can use Bulldog clips you can use whatever you have to hold them together because we don't want them to be slipping around when we bind the book I'm not sure that I included the actual binding process because it would be really hard for me to explain how to do that in this type of video but I will link a video down below of a couple of other people's tutorials because there's already plenty of tutorials on YouTube where you can learn the basics of binding so so here I'm just stitching my pages in I use a wax going in thread so that it's so that it's strong but you can if you're learning especially you can use pretty much whatever you want whatever works for you I like to use the wax linen just because I usually sell my journal so excuse me so they need to be quite strong so I'm stitching in all the pages make sure you don't flip your signatures upside down by accident because then they're going to like hang out of your book all funny and like they might not line up to the to the holes that you've put in your spine you so just finishing up binding the book put in my last signature in and then what did I do after that I'm taking out all my bobby pins and then I'm just going to check that everything's sitting nicely um that it all fits in there nicely which it does my signatures aren't perfect as you I think I just showed you there on the spine um but that's okay because you can always cover it up so now I am going to go in and add some pockets so this is a really really really easy way to add pockets to a journal that's already been made so you can use washi tape up at the top and bottom of two pages and stick them together and that just makes a little tuck spot um or you can do the same thing here with some double-sided tape you could also use glue if you have glue or you could even stitch them together if you wanted to there's plenty of ways you can make pockets but for after we after you've already put it together this is just a really really easy and quick way so um now I think I'm just doing the same thing with the double-sided tape and just doing it with a bigger size page so you can see it gives you a nice sized pocket um to do it this way as well and I think that's just about all I'm going to do so I'm just showing you that you can cover your binding if you're not happy with it if you rush through it like me and you want to cover it you definitely can so that is the tutorial or process I hope it was helpful if you have any questions just leave a comment bye [Music]

Channel: Johanna Clough

Views: 5,705,274

Rating: 4.913271 out of 5

Keywords: littlebindy, paperdreaming, junk journal, vintage journal, tea dyed, coffee dyed, etsy, handmade, junkjournals, tutorial, process, video, junk journal diy, diy, how to, make your own journal, basic journal, diy journal, simple journal, easy journal, make a journal, notebook, make a notebook at home, make a junk journal, flip through

Id: iNpOffXCb58

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 07 2016