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Sunday, January 15, 2017

Junk Journals Tutorial 2: Part 1: Free paper is great!

Today's junk journal tutorial makes use of a free notepad I received from some sale or exhibition. ( I totally don't remember anymore, sorry! ) I love to get these because, er, I'm a bit of a paper junkie, but I don't always like the advertising that comes with it. However, it is always easy enough to use the paper to make a journal that you would like and the best thing is, it came free!

This is useful because at times, I come across lovely stiff paper in pamphlets or programme booklets. Although I would just love to make them into journals, I can't, because of all the words on them. So I keep (or hoard) free notepads and notebooks for this reason. 
This is a very easy tutorial to do and even if you have just one free notepad, it provides enough paper to make a number of journals.

The green and white notepad is the one I'm using. It comes from a property website but I don't want to be reminded of that whenever I use it. 

Using Free Paper

You will need:

Tools
Scissors
Bookbinding stapler 
or Stapler and Eraser combo (As written in Tutorial 1a)
Adhesive of your choice (I'm using glue tape which I bought from Daiso)

Materials
One free notebook/notepad
Old brochure (Choose one with hardier paper)
Paper (for cover. I used a page from Frankie magazine with a photo that I liked)

Steps:
1. Tear out your chosen number of brochure pages. Fold the brochure pages into half. This would form something that looks like a small book, on the left.  

2. Tear out a page from the free notepad and stick it on top of each page. You're done! 

Ok, obviously you would be expecting a bit more than that. Now chances are, like me, your free notepad paper will not fit your brochure paper and you will see some words or pictures sticking out the top. To counter this, I explored a few ways to decorate the pages. If you used a brochure with nice pictures, you probably won't have to read the following (but please do, anyway). But if you used one with boring words like me, then here's some decorating ideas:

(Note: Where possible, I have included links to the companies that produce the materials I used. If I didn't, it means I either bought them cheaply or I have totally forgotten where they came from.) 


Most cheapo method: Use marker pens to colour a design at the top. Here I opted for a simple rainbow design. You can also substitute the marker pens for other art mediums of your choice, like watercolours. 



Washi tape: Stick your favourite washi tape over the uncovered parts. Tape bought from MT tape.




Use a stamp of your choice and stamp it repeatedly. Here I used an awesome one from Typo stationery



Cut scraps of paper from previous scrapping projects and paste them at the top. This paper was from a Flow Book for Paper Lovers while the one below was from a paper pad from Popular Bookstore. You can also use scraps of pictures from magazines or newspapers or brochures. 





When you are done, staple the pages together using a bookbinding stapler or my alternative stapling method.
When you are done, you will end up with a nice set of stapled pages ready to be journalled in! But nice pages need a nice cover to hold them all together, no? We will cover that in the next tutorial! See you then!