Make an Artisanal Journal Featuring Paper Dyed With Coffee

1. Introduction - Make an Artisanal Journal: Do you love journaling? Do you love coffee? Do you love journaling while drinking coffee? Well, you're really going to enjoy this class because in this class, I will teach you how to create step by step, your very own handmade artisanal coffee stained paper journal. Keep watching. This might be your new favorite hobby. 2. Materials Needed: For this project, you will need decorative card stock paper for the cover, copy paper, 8.5 by 11. I use around 14 sheds, a ruler, scissors, or a utility knife. A tapestry needle, some thread. It's best to use heavier thread or embroidery thread, not lightweight sewing thread. Some cotton balls or cotton pads, a small container with coffee, an optional edge puncher, or corner puncher. 3. Cut Cover and Round Edges: For the demonstration journal in this class, I am going to be making the journal out of 8.5 by 11 inch copy paper, and that is going to get folded in half. So I am going to use a 12 by 12 piece of heavier, more card stock decorative paper for the front cover. So I am also going to need that to be 8.5 by 11. So I am going to cut that. That's important. When you are cutting the size for your journal cover, to be mindful of the pattern on the front. For example, I would like the pattern to be in this orientation so that when I fold it, there will be a front and a back. So I have to be sure that I cut 8.5. No, sorry, this would be the 11, and this would be the 8.5. If I do it this way, the orientation of the pattern. Would be this way, which is fine, but that just isn't what I want for this particular journal. So just be mindful of the direction if it has one of the pattern on the card stock. This is a totally optional step now that I have an 8.5 by 11 piece of card stock and my 14 pieces of paper, I am going to use this corner punch to round the corners. Of the journal and of all of the papers. I am going to do that right now. I'll be right back. Again, this is an optional step. I like it. It just adds a little bit of I don't know. Fanciness to the journal, little tailored look. You could use scissors to do this. You could get one of these handy gadgets. There's individual ones with only one size. But anyway, if you would like to do that, now is the time to do that. And 4. Coffee Dyeing/Staining Paper: Next is the fun part. You are going to need a waterproof surface to work on whether it's wood or I have this self sealing mat board. Whatever you need to use that's not cloth or paper or anything that's going to absorb liquid. I am going to use the coffee. I'm going to use a cotton ball. I'm going to take a piece of paper with the edges around it. You could start just splashing the coffee around. There's no rhyme or reason for this. You don't need to soak it completely. You can just do the edges. That's what I like to do. And just you can dab, you can squeeze and drip. There are just a lot of different methods to utilize and to experiment with. And the cool thing is, you have 14 pages. To die with coffee, and they are all going to be different. I am just going to do random things with the coffee and your page will now look something like this. Now I just go ahead and set that aside, let it dry and move on to my next page. Again, you can drip, dab, splash, play with it, experiment with it. I've seen people use a tray and dip the entire paper into the coffee mixture. If that's something you would like to do, you can do that, too. Personally, I'm a fan of the blotches and splashes and, uh, just things like that. Also, I think I forgot to mention you turn it over and do the other side as well, and you can kind of you can see you can go in between. Where the coffee was from the other side. There's no right or wrong really for this. This is just you having fun, experimenting and seeing what you come up with. You can use really strong Dorker coffee. You can use tea. So it's totally up to you if you're a tea drinker and that sounds better for you. Then use a tea bag. That would be great also. Just experiment and have fun. Other than that, there's no right or wrong. Alright, I am going to continue this with all 14 pieces of paper. And then I'm going to set them aside and let them dry. Now, when you get toward the end of your coffee container. You may start to get grinds on your pages, but, um, it really doesn't hurt anything. Uh, we're gonna brush those all away once it dries. So if that happens, don't worry. We can brush it off after it dries. 5. More Coffee Dyeing: Ran out of coffee, well, I was doing my pages, but the good ness is I made more. I wanted to show you this. This is a curig pod, but it's from sprouts and it actually has this material instead of plastic. So this makes for the most wonderful, watch this. You dip that in there, get rid of a little bit of the excess water, but keep some because you're going to dab this pod. Now, this gets very bold, strong marks on your paper. Again, you can use different methods. You can dab, you can swipe, you can drip totally up to you, but I wanted to show you this type of carrying pod that makes for an excellent tool for coffee dyeing paper. Now, you could see that some of these have dried a little bit. They're not completely dry, you could see that the coffee does leave a very nice color on the pages. I'm going to spread these out on my desk and let them dry completely so that we can begin the next process. While those are drying, I wanted to take a moment to show you another size of journal that I'm in the process of making also. This one is 7 " by 5.5 ". When it's folded, it's approximately 3.5 by 5.5 this makes for a very nice little pocket journal. These are the coffee stained pages folded in half that are going to go in it, but I wanted to show you alternatives that you don't have to use the whole entire paper. You can make any size of journal that you would like. 6. Remove Excess Powder From Dried Papers: Once the pages are completely dry, you can take a cotton ball, a cotton pad, anything that you can rub on the paper to get rid of excess powder or those grinds that I was talking about earlier. So just take the cotton pad or soft cloth, whatever you have paper towel, tissue, and go through all of the dried pages. And remove excess powder. Here's some of those grinds from earlier. See, they just they come right off. Continue doing this with all 14 of the pages. I want you to see how some of the seeming darker stains from the sprouts pod come out because they do look really, really dark. But watch. Once you start removing the excess powder, they match the other methods that you did with the cotton ball. So nothing to worry about there. It's not like some are going to be extra super dark and some are going to be really, really, really light. Unless, of course, your mixture was like that. But sometimes, when it appears to be really dark on the page, once you remove the powder, it isn't as dark as you thought it was going to be, so that is something you can experiment with as well. But I wanted you to see that that that can happen. Really, really dark looking. But once you remove the powder, it's much lighter. 7. Crumple and Fold Pages: Alright. Now for the next part, it's another really fun part. You have two choices at this juncture. Your page has been dyed with coffee. It's fully dried, and you have removed all of the residual coffee powder. Now, the two choices are you can fold it in half at this point and use the pages as is, or you can crumple them. That's right. There is no method to this. It is pure fun. Oh, you just start crumbling. I remember actually doing this back in probably middle school. And some of my friends zip pieces of regular paper to feel like material. It was super soft. I mean, they worked at it. But keep working at this and get it to the desired softness level or crumple level, whichever you would like. Again, experiment from no crumples or only what was caused by the coffee to really, really, really massive amounts of crumples to your pages. I think for this class, I'm going to make them pretty pretty crumply. They're gonna be pretty soft. So I just I like to look. To me, it looks like old parchment, like a map. You could even use this for other crafts, other activities that you have that require parchment looking paper. So you can use the coffee dyeing method for that. All right. So sometimes you might get some rips and tears for me personally. I don't mind that. It gives it character and personality. I'm not aiming for mechanical perfection on my journals. They sell them like that that you could buy. Mine I like them handmade looking with character. So some rips here and there, some, you know, imperfections. That's perfect. So once you get it to the desired level of crumpliness, you can then fold it in direct half and get a nice crease going on that. And you can even continue to crumple from there and just keep going until you go, yes. That's that's the look I'm going for or that's that's what I That's what I like to see. This looks good. So, I am going to do this with all 14 pages, and I'll meet you back here. A 8. Preparing Thread: Did you do the little voice in your head when you read that? I did. At this point, you now have a beautiful folded stack of your coffee stained and crumpled pages. So the next part will be to sew the journal together. So for that, we are going to use thread. I like to use this kind of thread. I know they make different sizes. I prefer this one. I believe it's a number ten or something like that, but you can see the weight of this. It's not too heavy, but it's also not too light either. It's just my personal preference. Just don't use regular sewing thread. It is way too small. I am going to measure out the thread to do that. I'm going to start I like to leave a little what I call a tail, a couple of inches because I like to add beads or glue rinstones onto these just for extra added embellishment. I'm going to measure a few inches. That's how much thread will need. But I also like to make a bookmark. I do that. Here's the top of the journal, I hold it, and then I bring some down as if this is going to be the bookmark at the top of the page. And then I like the bookmark to be longer than the tail just by a bit. You can always adjust this later. So use the scissors to cut the desired length of thread that will be used to bind the edges of the book, but also as a tail for embellishment and a bookmark that you'll be able to place in the journal. All right. So actually, the cool thing is, you could use any color of thread that you would like or multiple colors. If you're using several strands of, let's say, an embroidery thread, you're going to want at least four or five, six strands of that. You could use multiple colors. Why not? Be creative. Also, though, the cool thing is, you can stain this with the coffee. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to then put this in the coffee and you could see already that it's starting to take the color. And I will leave that in, I don't know. Maybe, 15, 20 minutes, and it won't be dark white anymore. It will have the coffee stain on it. So let's wait for that. 9. Sewing the Journal Together: It is now time to start sewing the journal together. I put the dyed and dried thread onto the needle and now you have the cover and the inside pages that you folded and crumbled. The outside cover is folded down the center. What we will do is we will open the journal to the center and you can see the crease and you can see the crease. So decide which direction, which way is up, which way is down, which way is going to be orientation do you want the outer card stock to be? Once you have that, keep that in mind because that is going to dictate where the tail of the thread is going to be and where the bookmark is going to be. So in my case, this will be the bottom of the journal. So what I'm going to do is just hold it and turn it over, keeping in mind the orientation. This is still the bottom of the journal and what you will need to do. However you're comfortable sewing, just know where the bottom is. Use your tapestry needle. I would say roughly an inch or so, three quarters of an inch from the edge. Punch a hole with your tapestry needle. Then start getting journal pages, line them up with the outer cover. But also, you have to realize where the first hole was line them up and puncture now through all of the pages. The inside would look like this. There's three pages, the outside looks like this, and you just continue to do that until you have all of the pages punctured. I suggest maybe try two, three pages at a time. A more pages than that gets too thick for the needle to puncture through and you risk damaging it. I am going to puncture through all of these and I'll be right back. Once all of the pages are punctured through, pull the thread through and like I said, for the tail, I like to leave maybe two to 3 " so you are going to leave the two to 3 " and tie like that and I like to do one more. Like that. And now you have a tail. So at this point, you will see that your thread may look something like this. What I like to do is my next stitch is going to start about here. We that knot was, I put it in the center, if that makes sense. At the whole, at the bottom, but just at the center so that it will look something like this. Then my next stitch is going to be for this size, I'm going to say an eyeball, I don't know, 2.5 " just doesn't have to be exact. About right there and begin puncturing all of the pages and the cover again like we did. There. I'm going to do that. Just be sure to line them up. The center of the journal pages line up with the center of the cover. Now the pages are all punctured through. You can see I didn't quite exactly get that in the center. That's okay. Like I said, I personally don't go for mechanical perfection. In the journals, I like more of a handmade feel. The next stitch in the center, this is the bottom. This is the tail. The next stitch, I am going to make about that long and going to start here. And puncture, several pages at a time until I get to the outer cover. The pages in cover are now all punctured through, so I'm going to Hold the thread through. Be sure that the thread is pulled through all of the pages and there's no loop or not or anything like that. Looks like we're good here. That's just something to be mindful of. Now the last stitch, again, I'm going to keep about the same distance as here, it's going to be about right here and I'm sure everything all the way through. Everything is punctured through. I'm going to pull the thread through. Now, this is the top. This is going to be what I call the bookmark. Now for this, take the thread, make sure there's no loops, go back to the outside cover, use the same holes as guides and put the needle down through. All of the holes. Now that the needle is through the hole that you already punctured, you have a loop. Pull the needle all the way through before you pull the loop tight, make a knot, like so. And at the top of the journal, that's where it's going to be the bookmarks. Again, I like to double knot. We already did the first knot. Now, let's make another knot. Like so. And look at that. You have a bookmark, and you have an embellishment tale and we can embellish the bookmark. We can embellish all of this next. I am going to show you how to do that with some ideas in the next step. 10. Embellishing the Finished Journal: Something to keep in mind while designing the embellishments, maybe some of the key points of things the front cover, the back cover, the bookmark that we created and the tail. Also, if you would like to create some type of closure for the journal, that can be done in this embellishment stage. Those are the key points when embellishing and decorating that you will want to consider. Use whatever materials that you have and start thinking of how you would like to decorate the bookmark, the tail, and how you would like the front and back cover to look, and if you would like a closure or not. I will let you design that, and I'm going to go design this one, and I'll be back to show you what I came up with. And now it is time to show you my completed hand made coffee stained paper journal. I have added a wax seal and attached it with some thread and added some beads, and this acts as a closure. For the journal and the bookmark and the tale, I have added some simple grindstones. Now again, you don't have to add any embellishments if you don't want to or you can bring this all up. You do whatever you would like to do for your journal. So I just wanted to show you mine. Now it's time for the assignment. 11. Project Assignment: This is the part of the class where I give you an assignment. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it is to create your very own artisanally handmade, handcrafted coffee stained paper journal. You can make it whatever size you would like. You could use whatever embellishments you would like. Just make a coffee stained paper journal. Then upload it to the project section and share your creation with everyone here. We would love to see it. I know I would. I hope you enjoyed this class. And if you would like to join me on any of the social media sites, you can find me at the Mystic Bart. Thank you so very, very much for watching, and I do hope you really, really enjoy creating journals. Thank you. Bye.