This Christmas I’m gifting a few of my nieces and nephews little junk journals. Inspiration from several talented craft artists gave me the idea to make the covers from candy boxes.
I have so much interesting paper of all different types that it took me just a few minutes to gather enough for several small books.
Each book has only two signatures. There are approximately 8 papers, including an envelope, folded in half that make up the signature, so there isn’t too many pages; I didn’t want to make the book overwhelming.
I used papers from comic books, old book pages, maps, graph paper, ledger paper, music lessons, coloring books — pretty much anything that was colorful or had an interesting design on it.
I used lots of clothing tags I had been setting aside.
And I used plenty of food labels. I had been saving stickers I peeled off of fruits and vegetables. Those went in here too.
My kids wanted one immediately so we went to work on separately making junk journals for them. We used chocolate packaging.
The simplest and fastest way to get the signatures in is to use the long-arm stapler. I love that thing! It has saved me so much time. Yes, it’s a little ugly, but honestly, who cares?!
Inside I let the kids pick whatever they wanted. My 7-year-old daughter was quite specific on what she wanted. She already has experience with making these books so knew what to do.
My 4-year-old son did his own thing too.
Of course he went to town with the stickers. That was great too!
The kids seem to think that they are done. Now I need to get them used to the idea that there is lots of opportunity to keep on adding and embellishing. We’ll see if I can get them to add anything else.
Another mail-art junk journal
They look brilliant 😀