Easy Book Binding: Junk Journal

1. Junk Journal Intro: Hi, I'm Dana Harris Seeger. Welcome to this class on junk journaling. Today we will be making at least one junk journal because it's really hard to make just one. They're addictive. I'll show you how to make the covers, fill it with all kinds of cool papers, bind it using a pamphlet stitch and then you can start using it. 2. Class Project: In this class, we are going to be creating junk journals. Junk journals are really cool because you recycle paper, you use what you have, you use what's around the house, and they're really easy to get started. They're really simple. They also don't take a lot of expensive equipment or anything like that. I like them because they break the ice. If you are afraid of a blank page or you have sketchbooks, but you're afraid to use them and ruin them because they're so nice, junk journals are really awesome because they're already junkies, it takes the stress and the scariness out of sketchbooking or journaling. Today we're going to be making at least one junk journal, but they are addictive, so I'm sure you will not be making just one. I hope you join me today in this class on junk journaling. 3. Papers: In this video, we're going to talk about materials that you need to create your junk journal. First, we need covers, and the cover paper should be sturdy. What I usually use is either watercolor paper. This is a watercolor paper that's been printed on using jelly print and laser printer. These are just straight up jelly prints that I created on this Bristol paper or heavy cardstock. So it should be pretty stiff because it's going to be covering and protecting your journal. This is, again, just watercolor paper or if you have printmaking paper like waves or arches, this one I've even got a print on print and collage. I think I'm going to use this for one of our covers. I like this process and using up the materials that I have. You can see that I've cut this out of a larger piece of paper and when I make prints, I don't really think about how they're going to end up. I just go with the flow and combine things. I often end up with leftover pieces that I'm not going to frame or use in a print and cutting them down to make covers for junk journals is one way that I use up my scraps. Then we've also got the interior paper. I don't just use drawing paper, although I do sometimes put in some just straight up. Let's see if I've got one. This is just blank sketchbook paper or drawing paper, and I like to save music pages. I've got just regular sort of construction paper or colored paper. This one hasn't been bound yet, interspersed with this one, a fine rice paper. You can use pretty much any type of paper, dictionary pages, old pages that you've already written on, but you don't really need anymore. This is printed. The interior pages though should be a little bit thinner than the cover. You don't want the paper to be too stiff. But that being said if you wanted to do a lot of watercolor or mix media in your journal, then you might want to opt for some heavier weight card stock or lighter weight watercolor paper. I've got maps here that I use, geez, all kinds of stuff that you find from the Goodwill or the antique store. If they're already folded, then you can just cut or tear out the folios. This is just folded in half. And so I get that. These are just folded in half and you can actually just carefully take it out of the staple and reuse the page just like it is already folded. These are fun. Don't worry if they already have stuff on it. They're already decorated because I'll show you how to either cover that up or you can use acrylic paint in all kinds of other ways, collage to add to your journal to make it uniquely you. If you're planning to make a book that's about this size, which is a six by nine, then you want either 8.5 by 11 size or nine by 12 because when you fold that in half, then it becomes the right size. It becomes the six by nine. We can always cut them down. One of the tools I'll show you is a paper cutter. But it's okay if you have pages that are a little bit smaller because they'll get bound in and that adds to the fun aspect of the junkiness of the journal because not everything is the same. If you're not, even if your pages are a little bit off, we can work with that. 4. Junk journal materials: Okay, over here, I've got some more materials. One thing that I really, really like is having a self healing mat. You can get these from the art store or from the fabric store. You use them a lot for quilting or cutting fabric, but they're really nice for using um, the razor blade or exacto knife because they won't hurt your table surface. We'll also be using this punch, which is an all for poking holes in the cover and the pages. It's nice to have something that won't go through to your table when you're poking holes in something. Having a self healing mat or some table protector or table that you just don't care about a nice junky wood table or piece of plywood that goes over your surface, that's really handy. I use this ruler, which is a quilting ruler, but you can use any ruler for measuring out my page sizes or my cover sizes. I've got a range of cover sizes and once you get started, you'll use what you have. So books will end up small and some books will end up a little bigger. That's okay. We can cut pages down either with the exacto knife with our scissors. Or with a paper cutter. This one's cool because it just slides. You put the paper in and you slice it like that, and it's nicer for things like tissues or lighter weight papers because some chopping or exactoblade cutters, they crumbled the paper, crunch it up. I don't like that. But this paper cutter is really nice and it's not that expensive. This one I think is made by fiscars. Bone folders really nice for creasing pages, creasing the cover. You will need some type of thread to bind your book with. I prefer this pearl cotton embroidery thread. Doesn't have to be waxed because you're really not going through the book that many times. The pamphlet stitch is very simple to master. It comes in a couple of different thicknesses. This one's a little bit thicker. You could use traditional embroidery thread. The only problem is it's stranded, there's lots of strands that can untwist. There we go. This one's nice because it's already twisted, as you're pulling it through the book, it stop going to untwist. A needle. A needle is very handy for threading your thread and dragging it through the spin. We'll need one of those. Optional but recommended as some type of binder clip or spring clip or anything that will clip your pages together as you're binding so they don't shift around on you. We already covered scissors, very handy for cutting paper, trimming, and then if also optional is something ribbon that you can use to tie your journal together. Sometimes they can get thick, especially when you start filling them in. And if you don't particularly like that or you have a book that has a foldover flap and you want to keep it together, then I like using these decorative ribbons. Is hem tape, brick rack, or just simple like grow green ribbon. Again, use what you have. Maybe you have some string or some yarn, use that that's optional also. Those are the basics and basic materials and now we can get started making our journal. 5. Cover: Okay, now we're going to talk about covers. When I'm making my covers, I can make them a couple of different ways. This one has sort of a wrap around flap. It's got all the pages bound inside and then this part is a little bit longer in the back. I just folded it over and to keep it from moving around, I attached a ribbon using a sewing machine, and that way I can just wrap it wrap it around and tuck it in, or you can make two and tie them. But planning this out ahead of time and seeing where to put your if you want a longer piece of paper or if you want to attach a ribbon or something, that is about the only planning that I do when I'm thinking about covers. This cover has a print that's been collaged and I usually do that before I bind it altogether because it's easier to do all that. If I'm going to stitch anything to it, then I'll do that before I bind it altogether. You can do that. You can collage on your cover. This one's pretty small. It's just a jelly print, but it's stiffer than the interior pages, so it has a little more structure. This one also has a wrap around flap. This one I was going to do. It's got a cool window. It's from a Kleenex box, but it's stiff car for. So in the spirit of using what you have, you know, look around, see what you've got. See what's laying around. You could cover paper over that or whatever. But it will be easy to punch through and nice and stiff to use for one of my covers. All right. Now we're ready to create this cover and I'll show you just how I cut it. The paper shape is weird. It's not how I want to make my book. I like it when the books are rectangular. But it's nice and long, so I could either use this part down here and make a squashier book, but make it long, or I could make a book that's more tall and narrow. It's just up to you. I've got some pages. I have pages that I want to put in the book of a specific size, then I can fold those in half. Then I can see about how big maximum my books got to be to cover that up. Then I can position it where I want it. Maybe I want to see more of the fan. Although when it's folded, that'll be on the back. That's okay or I could focus on this leaf part or I could make the fan upside down. It's a job journal, so it doesn't really matter. It's just up to you. I just put it right in the middle. I think for this one, I want to about this collage part. As soon as I'm done arranging ranging where I want it, then I'm going to take a pencil, mark around it, or you could use a ruler and then I'm going to use either my scissors, paper cutter, this one doesn't work quite so well on the stiff paper. If I don't have a pair of scissors, I can use my self healing mat and my razor blade and ruler and slice, which is probably what I'm going to do for this so I get nice clean edges. It looks like I have a little bit of space for a wrap around too, which I'll probably do. If I'm going to wrap it around, I want to make it a little bit wider than it's ultimately going to be the flap will fold over. I'm going to just lightly outline where the book is going to be. You can make it a little bit larger than the page, just so it covers it all completely or you can just make it exactly and some of the pages might stick out, it's job journal, so it doesn't really matter. I'm going to take it over to my self healing mat and use a razor blade and a ruler to trim the book size, the cover page to size. Okay, now we're at our self healing mat and I've got the ruler. I can see my faint line. I'm going to line up the ruler so that it matches. One thing I really like about this quilting ruler is that it see through, but it's also a grid. You line it up with the self healing mat too. And then I'm just going to press down as I glide the ruler as I glide the razor blade along the ruler. If it's a nice new blade, you don't have to do it 1 million times and you get a nice clean cut. I just rotate it around. Again, I want to make sure that I'm cutting on the mat and I'm not cutting on I'm not going to end up cutting on my table surface. You can go slow and if you're pushing too hard and it's still not going through, just go over it a couple of times. I'm leaving this edge. And line wasn't very straight. If you use a pencil, then you can erase your line if you see. You don't want to see it. It didn't quite go through to push a little harder. Then, of course, you got to save your scraps because you can use this in your journal or as collage, save your scraps now we have our cover. I'm not going to fold it just yet until I know how the flap is going to go. But if it didn't have a flap, I'd just fold it in half and that'd be my journal cover. 6. Interior Pages: Now that we have our covers, whatever dimension we want them to be, we're going to work on our interior pages. This, I folded to get an idea of how big this book was going to be. Now, I fold that later, but now I can see that it's not going to be any taller than this piece of paper, and if it's wider, then it's going to stick out the side of my book. I don't want that. So I'm going to find papers that are either smaller than this or I can cut them down using my paper cutter. One other fun thing I like to do because it's a junk journal is use stuff that I was normally going to throw away like this envelope. If I fold it in half, I cut the little top part off, then I can find it into my journal and I've got two little pockets instant pockets that I can use to store things in my journal. Envelopes business envelopes also make fun a little pockets. You can keep this or you can cut it off the window lets you see things. So you don't disregard anything. If it's paper and you can bind with it, you can use it in your journal. I might use this one for the larger journal because I could stick it in like that and then it becomes part of the binding. And a little pocket. Anything that you have though, you want to fold in half because what we're trying to do is create what are called folios, a single piece of paper that's folded in half, it's called a folio, and that's what gets bound using the thread stitch into our book. If there are multiple folios all bunched together, that's called a signature. What we're doing is we're creating one large signature with multiple junky havea. I usually don't think about too much what is going to go in it. I just start cutting. If it's got something like a flap like that, then I'll want to cut it off. Again, as long as when I fold it in half, it fits in my book, we're good to go. You might want to organize or group your interior pages by size just in case you're making two different size journals. But again, they can all fit within the largest size, it's up to you. I'm just going to start taking some pages and trimming them down. Let's see if this one means Your paper is thin enough, you don't need a bone folder, but if it's it's getting thick and unmanageable, you can use the bone folder to help crease. Now, if I stick this next to it, it's going to stick out a little bit. I'm going to just trim that. I also have let's see. Good for collage. I also have some drawing paper, just plain drawing paper that I can cut and stitch in. This will give me just a couple of blank interior pages in case I want to do some drawing or anything like that. I just want to check the size and it looks a little big, so I'll cut that down too. This one I'm using to measure because I know that my pink is the same size, so I'm going to line it up and slide it under the paper cutter and just keep it so that when I slice it, it's the same dimensions. Then as you go along, if you've got a lot of paper to cut, you don't have to fold it after you cut. You can just stack them up and then fold it all later. That's usually what I end up doing a assembly line type of deal. So some of your pages might be let's see, but an example. Some of your pages might be longer than your book. I was going to make, let's say, this little book. I'm going to fold it in half by lining up the corners. I'm going to keep my fingers on the top part. It's simmered down. Then as best I can crease with my thumb. It's like a holding and a creasing action. Then as soon as it's folded, you can get a better crease on it with the bone folder. Some of my pages like this one, if I want to add this one might be longer. Just like what we did with our cover, if we want to make a folded Okay. I've cut this is 5 ". I want the height to stay the same, so it fits nicely inside. But what if I folded it like that. Then I have this flap. I could fold the flap in or I could fold the flap over. You could fold it in. Now I bind just this part, but I've got a little foldout section of one of my pages that I can have little secret notes or just added extra drawing page, and that gets bound in just like that. Then as your journal, you can unfold it. That's another fun thing to do if your pages are big enough or you're making a small book. 7. Decorating pages: While we are making our interior pages, we might want ones have stacked a little bit of stuff together, but it's plain. What if I took one or two of the interior pages and pre decorated them? I'll have so you can do this on blank paper, a blank side, or you can do it on something that's already decorated and it makes it look a little bit different. Let's try these three little papers, and I'm going to just start by using watercolor set, this one's handmade by a case for making from San Francisco. I just got a little brush. I'm just going to make some marks. You can make lines, you can make the hot pink. You can make dots or dashes or whatever suits your fancy, but something to add a little whimsy to your page. You can do it on both sides. Mix it up. But that also breaks up the tension and helps you not be so precious with the pages and the journal. Let's do a couple more. We'll do maybe some lines on the next one. This one. This one's already got something on it. Let's do this side. I want to use maybe this umber cover. Some wines. With watercolor varying your amount of water gives you a lighter or darker or more intense or a tinted version. You'll also notice that you'll also notice that I protected my work surface with piece of brown paper, just scrap paper that I had laying around. And that's because I didn't want to get even the water color is water soluble and you can clean it up really easily with water. I didn't want to have to worry about that too much and I can run my paint off my page. You can see the less water I add, the more intense the pigment gets. But more water I add the softer, more lighter. Pigment. Blank ones. Let's do one more inside here. Blue. Really cool blue. If you're working with a theme, like a color theme, then you can choose a palette of colors. But for right now, I'm just going with the flow. I'm picking colors that I like on this palette. You have to be straight to chrome Because you're using papers, what we call ephemera, which are papers that are not really meant to last, they are not archival or acid free like some. This one's specifically made for art. But papers like this children's music book or this kids lined school paper. Some of those won't hold the water as well. You might notice that it bleeds through. You can experiment with different papers and different media and instead of watercolor, maybe use markers on a thinner, uh, ephemeral paper that's going to discolor and you can see this one tears really easily because it's just an old dictionary. Um, so it's kind of yellowed around the edges. I mean, that adds a nice patina to your book. But think about how you're going to be using it and what you do want to save and how you want it to end up looking before you start adding media. My advice is to experiment. Again, if the water just disintegrates the paper or makes it look weird, then maybe try some markers or some, uh, some other acrylic paint or something that doesn't have as much of the water in it. Then we're going to let this dry before we bind it into our book. If you want to get interesting textures or add any more designs, you can use paper towel to kind of blot. That helps it to dry, but it also gives a different texture. If you're not afraid to just play around, you can can be messy and use all kinds of different methods for decorating your pages. This is what we're doing before we bind it in just to add a little bit of variety. But we can also definitely decorate our pages after we bind them. 8. Binding: Now we're going to punch our holes, and for this, you can use a template or you can just wing it. If you want to use a template, then I would suggest using a piece of paper that is as tall as your book. Doesn't have to be as wide because we're just going to mark the spine. If you want to take a piece of paper, and then fold it in half so that it's the same height as your spine. Then you can use a ruler and a pencil and draw a little dot. Let's see. I've got my ruler here. I want to make them a mark at the middle, very middle. Then at least if your book is small, we're just going to do three holes. I like to keep my top and bottom holes about half an inch from the top of the book and a half an inch from the bottom. If you have a taller book, then you can do five holes. After you do the half inch top and bottom and the half the center hole, then you can just do one equidistant from the middle. So this is looks like 8.5 8.5 tall. We're going to make a mark. Here's the half inch. My pencil work. Then one here. Because that's a half inch from here to here. Then we're going to do, we've got a half inch and if you need your ruler, you can get the ruler out half inch from the bottom, and then the center of 8.5 is going to be four and a quarter, one, two, three, four, and a quarter. That's the center. Folding it lightly, increasing it will also give you the center. Remember, this is a template, so it doesn't have to be perfect. Piece of paper doesn't have to be perfect. The hole should be. Then equidistant from this hole to this hole. About right there. That way, now you have your whole guide. Whatever book you have, that's 8.5 " tall, this will be your guide for punching your holes through your whole book and signature. I'm going to reposition my book. I'm going to lay this in the little *****. Line it up as best I can. If you have additional binder clips, you can clip your template to your book, but just make sure again that your V, your valley, your ditch is all in the same all laying in the same ditch. Otherwise, you'll end up with holes that go weird directions. Again, I'm doing this on my self healing mat. You can use a stiff dense piece of cardboard, back up a sketchbook works really well, or a pad of paper. You can use old foam books, but now I'm just going to punch through all the holes. If I have to, I angle my book and wiggle wiggle the all. This is a little hole punch through so it gets to the other side. And then I'm going to do my next one, punch and wiggle, pokes through. Ideally, you want it to poke through right along that mountain fold. Wiggle wiggle, wiggle. Poke wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. Be careful. This is really sharp, so don't put your finger to brace it where the hole is or you'll end up poking. There you go. If your all is like mine where it's the same thickness all the way down, then you don't have to worry about how far you go, but some s get thicker the farther they go to the handle, you just have to be careful you don't make your hole too big. Set my template aside, and now we have holes and we're ready to sew. Because this has a five hole pamphlet, I'm going to use my thread here, my pearl cotton. I'm using my pearl cotton. Thread, Broidery floss. I'm going to measure, about 2.5 or a length that's 2.5 or three times the height of my book. Then I'm going to cut. I don't want it to be too short or I won't have enough to go back and forth along the spine of the book. If it's too long, that's okay because you can always just reuse it. You've got plenty here for a smaller book. I'm going to thread my needle, which is probably the hardest part of this whole thing. There's our needle threaded. If your needle is too fat, if it's too thick, then you'll end up making too big of a hole again. Going to use it singly, but I'm doubling it up just at the end because I might need some extra. For this method, you can start from the inside of your book or you can start from the outside. If you start from the outside, whichever end you start with, you'll see a little tail because we tie it off. If you like that idea or you want to maybe put some decorative beads on the end, then start on the outside. But I'm going to start on the inside and start on my center hole. Because I've pre punched, it makes it really easy to poke it in. I'm going to pull it through, but I'm going to leave about a three to four inch tail on the inside. Then I'm going to poke it in. It doesn't matter which one, but just the next hole, you're going to go in from the spine. To the inside and I hold the tail with my thumb so that as I pull it, it doesn't fly out. Then I'm going to go to the side one. I'm weaving doing this running stitch the inside out. Then I'm going to go back down that hole. I go back in the hole I just came out of last and make sure that it comes out that hole. About the dogs. I'm pulling it a little bit tight as I go and you'll be able to tighten it later. But now that I've gotten two on the outside and one wrap on the inside, I'm not going to go back into this hole. I'm going to skip over that hole and go into the next one right here. Then I'm going to go from the outside to end, just like I did originally at the beginning. Oops. There we go. Give a little tug, you don't want to tug too much or you'll end up tearing your paper back out. A little talk. Now, this whole interior part is completely sewn and I've got one more little jump to do. I'm going to go back down where I started in the center. I'm going to pull on that. I'm going to pull this guy through and now the backside is done. Make sure there's no real loose pieces. Then for this part, I want each of the threads that are coming out the middle. I want them on opposite sides of this middle thread because I'm going to tie a knot, just a square knot. I'm going to go once and then I'm going to do it one more time. Just like that. I trim it and that will secure about a half an inch trim. Now it's secured, it's knotted. Put this somewhere safe. It's now knotted, holding all the threads together, and we take this out. You'll see that it's all bound together. Decorative pages, a little pocket envelope. That's all there is to it. Again, if you had that coming out the back, you could keep it long and put some beads on it or whatever to make it fancy. I could wrap a ribbon around it, but that is essentially your finished kernel. The next section, I'll just have a little bonus where we decorate the pages and maybe add some embellishments. 9. 3 hole pamphlet: Okay. Say you have a smaller book and you want to only use a three hole pamphlet stitch. You do the same thing you did before where we clamp our pages. Like I said, before you can do one side or you can do both sides. It's so small, I can just hold it in my hand. I've got my needle threaded with this cool amber colored thread. I'm going to punch three holes, one right in the middle. Bunch of the. One about half an inch from the end, and then another one about half an inch from the other end. Again, you could make a template for this, but it's so small, you can just eyeball it. Then I'm going to go in from the inside out. Hold it with finger. Because there's only three holes, I'm going to go back in one of the sides. I'm going to skip the middle and go out the other side, and then we go back in the middle, back down the middle so I come out on the inside, give a little tug, of my needle and then make sure that they're both on the opposite sides of this middle Bread. Tie down. One more knot. Awkward if it's too short. If you have enough thread, leave the longer tail. Tying. It then just trim it. There you have it. The three hole pamphlet. Nice and neat on the outside. 10. Embellishing: Now that we have our junk journal all bound. So cute. A couple more things I wanted to share how to decorate it. On the inside, if you've got pages maybe that have things already on them, either writing or painting, you can use papers that are not written on blank pages or see. Stuff that's a little bit less busy. Although this group of pages is a lot more busy than what? Let's choose this one. Maybe I want just a little area to write or draw picture so I can take some washi tape. This is really fun decorative tape and I could just tape in a little a little piece. Doesn't have to be in the center. Just put that on there. I could leave it flapped or I could do one more on the bottom. But that will give me a little bit of blank space to do some writing. You can do that all over the place. You can do a couple on a bigger piece. However you want to do that, you can use markers or, again, the watercolor paint now to decorate your pages after the fact. I also use papers, maybe some leftover paper that I had from the cut off part that I can collage in and you can use a water based glue. I find that if you want to work quickly through your journal and make a lot of additions without having to wait for it to dry, then just a regular glue stick works really well. It usually holds well enough. If you're having trouble, maybe it's old, maybe it's a cheapy version. This washable school glue might not be the best if you want a super permanent bond. Here I stitched it, stitched it down, put a little piece of tape on it. Then when you're all done, you just take your ribbon. Tie it up. Make a nice little bow, and you're done. 11. Thank You: Well, that's it. Thanks for taking this junk journaling class. I hope you had a lot of fun, got some inspiration and join me on my next Skillshare class.