Junk Journal with Tab Binding Tutorial

foreigner hello and welcome today. I'm excited to share a project using these file folders and some of the snippets you see around me. As I go through all the snippets, I'll explain what I'll do. I have been part of a Facebook group started and coordinated by Nina Ribena. She has a YouTube channel and I have learned a lot from her. Is incredible. I love watching her videos. She posts a message every week on her YouTube channel. So, you can post photos of your Take On The Prompt in the Facebook group and by the way, a few years ago he also joined Kylie Coo, who is on leave at the moment and can't participate at the moment, but anyway , Nina is going on vacation and she asked for a couple of people to cover for her while she was on vacation, so I'm very excited and surprised that they selected me to be one of the two people to cover for her for two weeks, so this is the first video I'll be sharing for the Facebook group and I also forgot to say the other person is Anne from Curious Moon Designs and I'll post a link to her YouTube channel below so you can see her project.

So the first prompt we decided on for this week is birds, bees and botanicals because you know it's very alliterative and who doesn't like birds, bees and botanicals? The only thing missing are the butterflies, but Nina already had a butterfly message not long ago. Anyway, as you can see, I'm putting some clippings in the file folders and when I do something like this, which I consider making a collage, I guess I like to put a lot of clippings and papers to pull out that I could use around me. so I can try things out to see how they look while I'm doing it there and you also know it's less overwhelming if you pull out some things that you might want to use, then you know you're going through your whole stash of things trying. to find things to use so if you know some parts of your stash around you I think it's a lot easier to put something together so my idea was based in part on Nina's master board um videos she's made several and what I thought.

What she would do is make the background of my

journal

using these pieces of paper. She was trying to keep me neutral but with bits of color here and there, and then I'm going to cut these folders into my

journal

pages and then decorate them. with the birds bees and the botanicals, so you will see the process. Oh, and then I have a um. I'll show you how I bound it with the tab

binding

. I've wanted to journal using this method for a long time, so I thought this would be a good time to do it, so when I make a collage like this, it's really just an intuitive process.

I cut papers and in different sizes, different shades, they may be neutral, but they are different neutral shades and you just lay them out, it's just a feeling if they look good or not, and you know everyone has different opinions on what looks good and what no so you know it's really up to you to decide how you want to organize your papers and um the other. What I discovered about collage is that the more you do it, the better you get at it, I don't want to say I'm great at it, but I feel like I'm a lot better at it than when I started, like anything else, you know? practice something and you'll get better at it so again I'm trying to stay neutral because I'm going to add embellishments on top of these papers you'll see later on I'm using my glue stick I'm using a hotel key card to um just Make sure the paper is a little flattened, there are no bumps if you use a glue stick.

I think a glue stick works well, but you can use any glue you want, but if you use glue. stick just make sure you cover the entire back surface of the paper so you don't get bubbles or know places you miss and I'm missing a few corners where I have to re-glue them but for the most part it works great and this is a little diary for me, so it doesn't have to be perfect either, so that's what I'm doing, I just leave my papers. I'm trying to move fast without thinking too much. I'm a master at I'm overthinking things, so when I do these projects again I try to keep going and I know that if I make a mistake, a supposed mistake, or if I do something I don't like, it can always be fixed and I'll show you. . that too later so here is my board or not really a master board this is what my file folder looks like and I'm going to trim the edges trim all those papers around the edges and I'm going to do the same process in the Another file folder that I have because these will be the pages of my little mini diary.

Once I cut them out and make the other file folder that I think I'll show you next, I'm going to cut them into um pages and of course. I'm saving those little scraps for later use. I find it hard to throw something away before making the next file folder. I'm saying if you have little spots where you think it needs a little more, you can add pieces like that to make it a little more interesting and I'll add a few more pieces here and there. I'm adding some washi tape and I also end up adding a spoiler alert.

I end up adding some washi tape which I really think is terrible, but I end up fixing it in the end so stay until the end of this video to watch it and there you can see the washi tape that I added on the left side under that girl. I really don't like it very much. I'm adding. Scrap paper doilies now too to add a little interest. I tried that piece but I didn't like it, so there's that little piece of mat and there's my first finished folder and my second one, which is not as ornate.

I really learned the lesson of not trying to put everything on one page and I like, I really like both of them, so I'm going to show you how I'm going to cut them up. I'm going to cut them into strips like this and I had a couple of small leftover pieces that I'm going to save in case I can use them somewhere else and I use that label to judge the width of the pages. I thought it was a good width even though I'm not going to make My Papers on Labels, so I cut out those embellishments, basically cut them out, cut the strips in half and I'm just showing you how they look.

I think they look very good. I love doing this process because, but I hate it. washi tape um because I think it turns out really good no matter what and like I said, if you make a mistake you can always cover things up, look like this, so um, I'm going to use it on the back of those pages. I use scrapbook paper and I decided this was probably a good use of Tim Holtz scrapbook paper, he has some beautiful ones and I have this pad of paper that has a lot of flowers and birds on it and I'll show you what it's called wallpaper , a pad of paper and then I also have this beautiful tell the bees wallpaper, I mean scrapbooking paper made by um craft Consortium.

This is a special edition. I don't think it's made anymore, it's probably hard to get hold of, but of course you can use any type of paper. you want on the back of your pages if you do this project, so I'm just showing you how it turned out. I'm not going to go through every page now, but at the end I'll flip through a little bit and show I love how it turned out so I decided the next step is that I really wanted to decorate the cover and have a front and back cover so my next idea was to use that little cardboard type frame, it's also a Tim Holtz piece and I quickly decided that was the piece I was going to use.

This almost never my covers ever come together so quickly. I'm so happy this all came together right away. Look how pretty it looks, so I'm going to glue it. those, the frame, on the little piece of scrapbook paper and then I'm cutting little strips of fabric to show you that this is how I'm going to start

binding

it and I wanted to see what the frame looked like with the little pieces of fabric I spent some time going over them, but I'm not going to show you all of that, I decided to go ahead and glue everything up moving quickly and so you can see, I glued the frame to the paper and now I'm going to glue the paper on my first page, which will be the cover of my journal.

I'm still looking at the scraps trying to figure out where to glue that paper and then I decided to do it, so here I go. I'm using my glitter glue that dries clear and many of you probably know this glue, but if you don't, it doesn't have glitter. This is the name of the company um and it's called clear because it dries clear and it's It's really strong when you put it down it dries pretty quickly and it also grabs on quickly so you have to be really careful you only have like a second to literally move it around , so I edge my cover with distressed brown ink that you can't see.

I'm using it, but it's just Tim Holtz Brown distressed ink. I like that look. I like vintage and I like worn things. Then I'll start showing you the binding process I did. I like to sew a little in my journals. I sewed those little pieces together which are completely optional of course you don't have to do that and I chose one piece to use as a back cover because I thought they coordinated really well so here is the tab binding process first of all I have to get my pages in order, so that's what I'm doing now and I'm trying not to repeat like two birds in a row, although they won't be next to each other and I'm just trying to quickly decide how to order my pages, that's important, you have to have them in the order you want before you start this process or I guess you can do it as you go, but it's a lot easier if you have them in order, so I do this. pretty quick and then we'll start the process so you can see to the left.

I have cut a lot of strips. You use three strips on one page, two on the next, three on the next two, the next, and so on. Obviously you can count the number you need, but I like to improvise, so I just cut a bunch of them and then in the end I had to cut a few more, but it worked out fine, so now I'm figuring out where to put my three strips in the first page and basically you just want to spread them out so you have enough space between each one to put two more strips that will get a little lighter in a moment.

I ended up having to trim my pieces because they were too wide, so I don't know if you can tell they're a little bit narrower there, so I'm going to start gluing them together and again this process, this is the way I like to work. I like to make

junk

journals that aren't perfect. I love it. mixed technique because it doesn't have to be perfect. I'm not the kind of person who is good at measuring and making things very precisely, so I just glue them together so you put three pieces in there. I just glue them together and they're a little bit crooked, but I love that look, so you turn the cover over with the three pieces and then you put the two pieces in there so you can see how you want the two pieces to fit in that space. and now you glue them. those two pieces face down and then once you glue them together you'll see the next step: flip the page again like you did with the first page and by the way if you want to use another glue you could use a fabric label probably even you could use a glue stick on this too so flip it over and then take the three fabric tabs on the front and glue them to the second page so you don't glue the two you just put on, glue the three, hope this makes sense .

I'll show you a couple more pages so you can see the process and besides the fabric, you can use masking tape, you can use tape, you can use any number of things, okay, so I glued my three together now. I'm going to turn it over, you can see what it looks like and I'm going to take the next page and I'm going to place it there and now, since I made two fabric tabs on the previous one, I'm going to make three on this page and Again you want them to line up so that can fit between the other tabs, so now I'm going to glue my three in and you'll see I'm not exactly being precise, but close enough for me works great. once you glue those three tabs on, you'll turn the page again and I'm getting glue everywhere.

I ended up with glue all over my fingers at the end, so you flip the page again, line them up and then you're going to glue the two tabs from the previous page down and that's how it works, you continue this way until you get to the last page and you I'll show you how to finish that, it's pretty easy, but it's a bit. Sometimes it's a little easy to get confused with lashes, so take it easy and you'll be fine. I'm making another page here to show you to make sure the process makes sense. I got confused at one point almost doing this.

I glued on the wrong tabs, but like I said, if you take it slow and steady, it's not that hard, so now I'm going to place two tabs, place that page lining them up and I'm going to glue the three tabs from the package on the previous page I hope This makes sense to everyone. You can make those lashes more flexible than I can. Also your Journal is a little more flexible and maybe if you do it, you think you are going to put a lot of things on your pages. I want to have more space, but for me I think I'm just going to do paper collages here and I think that'll be fine, so I glued those three together.

Everything looks pretty good so far, here's what it looks like and now, let's see. I'll continue with the next one. I'm going to place three tabs and so on. Well, this is where you get to the end, so this is thepenultimate page. I have two tabs from the previous one, so I'm going to make three tabs and I have my back cover there, I'm showing you, so I make three tabs and glue them on like before I had to do it. I cut one out and I had one left over on these, so I glued those three pieces together and flipped that page like before and then since I just glued three together, I'm going to take the two tabs from the previous page and glue them together.

You'll see that at one point they are too much on top of each other, so I just trimmed that little bit off to have enough room. I had to do that a couple of times in my journal, but like I said. I think it looks good, you can't even tell it when you look at the spine, so you glued the two pieces from the previous page back together and now that you're on the last page, you don't glue the back cover together. You place any piece of that back cover on top of your journal. I just had a little piece of paper that was falling apart and you glue on the last three tabs for that back cover and that's it, now you can finish at any time. you wanted, you don't have to have all these pages.

I tend to overdo it so I planned to make this journal a little smaller but that's how it worked out and happily it turned out to have three tabs at the end. end because I think that makes it a little stronger but you can also end with two tabs, it doesn't really matter so there's my little book and now I want to decorate it a little more and on the cover I thought about adding a title and I found this other piece of Tim Holtz, it's kind of chipboard, kind of text and sometimes those pieces are a little bit thicker than I want so I can just tear off layers of the back and I like the way it looks and I also distress it with some brown ink and stick it down there and so far I love the way it turned out and I love this process because I didn't really plan it too far in advance, but I just take it as I go and things always They seem to work, it's a lot of fun for me and I feel like I need something up there, but I don't know what it is.

I still hate that washi tape that's there and I'm just showing you some of the pages, well actually just one page and how I have some elements again scattered around me that I could use to collage the pages, so I think I'll to show you that you can also wear lace. On any of the pages you can use many things. I'm going to show you a quick little page that I came up with while I was looking at these elements scattered around me and those are: This is a b related page that I decided to put together, so I'm going to use that paper in the background and that little ornament of hive, a bee that is also from a Tim Holtz package.

This could be a Tim Holtz video and I like to use these labels, so I'm going to use a label to put it all together and stick it all together and here's my journal. I found that little bird, another lucky thing and I stuck it in there. I really like the look of the lashes. I finally covered that washi tape. I hate that the page I put together is there. quickly and made a couple more tabs with labels stuck on them, I just cut them from the scrapbook paper I used to back the pages, so always save your scraps.

I really like Clips. too, so I put that clip in there and I'll use it. At some point I'll cut something out there so I'll continue working on this journal and I'll probably do another video at some point showing how I collage some of the pages because I'm so in love with my little book and that's all thanks for watching and until next time