Hello everyone! So here I am again to bring you guys one of my most recent obsessions; The Junk Journal.
I discovered this new passion through my passion/obsession/madness with planners. Just as I discovered the passion of planning and decorating your planner through the passion of organizing a diaper bag and showing its contents. Yep, it’s all a big loop of videos I watched on youtube while pregnant with my son Rocco. Although, I must admit I have created a junk journal of sorts before, very long ago, when I thought making myself believe Lestat was real, was as natural as dipping your bread in the cafe con leche! Oh my! Now I have to go have a cup of that sweetness.
Several cups after (a lot more cups after) I still have that junk journal and flipping through it the other night brought back so many memories, and a strong desire to go back to being that Laura, but not as much “wanting to be her” as wanting to have her life. However, I would never leave my son behind… so much for wanting.
This new junk journal I have created, I hope will become if not an outlet for creativity and inspiration, a place where to find peace. So why don’t I just stop blabbering about something or other, and show you guys what it looks like, and how I got it there.
Here is a few things I got wrong and will now remember for next junk journal (oh yea! there will be plenty more to come); I realized after making all the signatures that the spine of the cover I had selected was too small for the signatures. It would not glue to it because it was just too narrow of a space and my signatures were too bulky. It seemed fine to me before sewing them together… I guess I’m just not that good at measuring.
All the washi tape is not only covering the holes I punched wrong but reinforcing some of the paper because a lot of it is just too old even when it doesn’t look vintage. Meh.
Sewing the signatures was first an arduous task. But once I did the first one, the rest became like a walk in the park. And I wouldn’t really be able to explain how I sew them here, but basically all I did was punch holes; miss the alignment; add washi tape to the holes on the wrong line; punch holes again, this time aligned; use a huge needle and a thick thread and sew away. Later I noticed I could have sewn each signature to the spine I created after realizing the original cover wouldn’t hold all of it. But… oh well!
Okay so here I’m showing you the signatures (which I keep seeing 5 but there is actually 4) together with the new top cover and the bottom cover. No spine.
Before I came up with my own covers, I looked around the bit of mess in my room for a book or journal I could tear apart. But nothing I found was old enough or undesired enough, so…. several minutes later and a headache I went to the kitchen and had a beer. Yep. I bet you thought I would say cup of tea.
What I really did was came up with making my own book covers, after all, I have done this before! I created my own sketchbook for the sketchbook challenge, and if you have no clue what I’m talking about go check it out here. Thanks. Now back to this book in question;
Sorry Scarlet Lime! But at least you have served more than one purpose. Okay, this picture is showing the top cover of the journal before doing anything to it. Gluing it to the signatures, or spine, or making it pretty… the whole ordeal.
I also used, for the spine, a piece of the box from the Planner Society. So my entire book cover and spine is made of the Planner Society’s box. Sweet. I first made sure the signatures would stay together by sweing them all together. How I did it was rather simple, I just ran a thread through all the threads in the back of each signature (don’t know if I’m making sense… sorry no picture of that). Then I glued a mesh that they actually sell for biding books. After that I glued the signatures all together with mesh and all to the spine. Then I had my signatures on a spine and no cover… but I knew I had figured out how to make the book. And I knew it would look magical. Yeah I can be a bit arrogant at times. I admit to that!
What follows here is just a few pictures of how it would look once I added the cover. Which I have no idea why I thought that was more informative than taking a picture of the spine of the book once finished putting it together. Ugh.
Once I finished taking those useless pictures right above, I went ahead and got just regular paper (white, for printing, no big deal), and I glued the spine (holding the signatures) to the paper first, then I glued the covers to each side and that was it. I had finished the basics.
This is the actual book before adding embellishments. It already looked sooooo pretty, thanks to Scarlet Lime and her Planner Society. ❤
At least you guys can see the mesh here glued to the signatures, well this is how it looked once opening the cover. Of course I took care of that and you guys will see how in the next post.
Well, now I will have to stop this post right here since it covers all the basics of how I made this book/junk jounal/amazing. In my next post I will be showing the finished product and a few other things.
Be sure to check out my youtube video for how it looks once I finished, before adding anything to the pages. Mind you is rather a long video and I do get carried away with talking about this or that… figures!
As always, thank you so much for reading me and I hope to read you in my comments section!! ❤
Sine Cera 