Junk Journal July Day 1 – Begin

Hello friends, and Saturday!

I might have a problem this month as I’ve committed to a LOT of stuff but we’ll just keep plugging away and see what sticks. Yesterday saw the start of Junk Journal July on Instagram something I really wanted to participate in because I have a lot of stuff to use up and this is the perfect opportunity to get that happening.

If you want to play along, here are the prompts:

I decided to make my journal out of some recent amazon packaging. They have started delivering some items in these heavy duty kraft bags instead of boxes, it works for some things but not for others are there is no protection against being crushed (ask me how I know that!) but they are really tough, hard to rip bags, so I kept a few of them to experiment on.

I the the bag down to the same size as I use for my other watercolour journals. I got four pieces cut from one bag, and used two of them glued back to back, for my cover. That’s the front in the photo above – I liked it for the front because it says “open here” in multiple languages. Also the “ama” of amazon is going to be turned into “ama-zing”.

Here’s the back of the journal with the big 100% recyclable statement on it. For the inside pages, I used some Amazon kraft paper packaging – the kind they scrunch up inside the boxes – and got 16 pages which I turned into two signatures. I sewed them together and then attached the covers and the spine and the book was ready to use. I have just enough pages for one single page per day so that will take some getting used to as I like double page spreads usually.

I dragged all my collage fodder and random leftovers out and started looking for something that might make a nice cover. The grey flowers in the middle are something I painted a couple of years ago and were supposed to be a turned into a card but never made it. There’s other random stuff in there, and a paint chip sample that I thought could make a handle to open the book. I drew that black arrow on pointing to “open here”, and then I found the ART lettering on a piece of watercolour paper and then I wished I hadn’t drawn on the arrow because the ART was going to cover it up. I spent a lot of time trying to find a different place to put it but no luck.

So the only thing to do was to redraw it a little smaller – not good for using up my stash but works for the cover now. There’s also some teabag paper there complete with string, a washi sticker and some watercolour offcuts. It was around this time that trouble appeared…

I think she approves but it’s hard to tell when she’s sitting on it!

She was quite happy to sit there for some time while I drank my coffee.

So now we have the new ART lettering, AMA is changed to AMAzing, everything else is in place but I just wanted something else, so I started playing around with placement of these cat stamps. May as well have one on the cover because, you know, cats. Plus Miss Lily insisted.

This is the finished front cover which also serves as Day 1 prompt – begin – which I wrote on the top left corner.

Teabag paper, book paper, tissue paper saved from packaging and gifts, washi stickers, cat stamps, watercolour offcuts etc etc etc.

It’s a great way to actually use up all those random bits and pieces – as is ICAD but I went in a different direction with that.

Let me know what you think in the comments. As always, thanks for reading!Ingredients
my handmade junk journal, collage fodder, bits and pieces as mentioned above,