When it comes to paper crafts, I’ve made plenty of cards and scrapbook pages in the past. Craft with a purpose. I couldn’t quite get my head around junk journals for a long time, although the pictures that came up on my Pinterest always looked very pretty. I even had what was effectively a face “junk journal” kit which showed exactly what to do with the bits it contained, but I couldn’t work out how to make it be right for me.
A while back I ordered a ton of ephemera and book pages from Etsy – nominally to use in scrapbook pages. But then they’ve never quite worked with the pages I’ve been doing. So I began looking into junk journals again. What exactly was the point of them?
So I was fishing around my craft things and pulled out this old round hardboard “scrapbook” which has been sat unopened for years – probably around a decade. I finally decided to open it up and experiment with some of the bits and pieces I had collected to create “something”. Not really a junk journal – everything in it was purpose bought for crafts – but something that at least imitated one. I decided each page had to have somewhere to write in it so that, over time, I can collect a few thoughts. I’m not sure what I’ll write about in it. The space available for writing isn’t exactly large and I’ve got a proper journal for longhand writing (and now this blog, of course). So it’ll be just for little snippets when I feel the urge.
Of course, I couldn’t get away with making the whole thing myself. Evie, my 7 year old mini me, decided she absolutely had to join in. So this is very much a team effort. Her pages aren’t all to my style, and she doesn’t quite get what I mean when I tell her to “layer things”. But she’s making a grand start and I look forward to seeing how her craftiness develops as she gets older.
