Find out how to create your very own junk journal and try your hand at bookbinding in this craft tutorial from Rosie.
Something I regret not having more time to explore while the I had the available university-owned resources at hand is bookbinding. Though I did make a couple of books, my Fine Art degree and practice didn’t readily lend itself to this craft. When I did spend time in the bookbinding workshops, I found the process really gratifying. Being able to use or hold an object and say ‘I made that!’, is something that I found a lot of joy and fulfilment in. Since graduating, I was given a bookbinding kit for my birthday, and I have been taking every opportunity to use it when a new creative project presents itself.
It is no surprise then that my contribution to the Whitworth Advent project comes in the form of a recorded bookbinding tutorial, in which I create a junk journal. I hope you enjoy learning about this simple way to make your very own book from the perspective of a relatively amateur bookbinder, and that it inspires you to try making a junk journal of your own, or something small for a loved one for the holidays.
PART 1: AN INTRODUCTION TO JUNK JOURNALLING
The video below introduces today’s craft, bookbinding, by giving definitions of what ‘junk journals’ and ‘zines’ are. I also show some examples of zines that have been displayed as part of two of the gallery’s recent exhibitions, (Un-Defining Queer & Economics The Blockbuster). Towards the end of the video, I will detail what equipment you will need to make your very own junk journal.
PART 2: MAKING YOUR JOURNAL
The video below details the step-by-step process of how to bind together your junk journal using a method called ‘saddle stitch’. The video is rounded off with some ideas about what you might use your journal for, and ways to decorate your pages. Happy Advent! – Rosie
Zines in order of reference:
Camille Halimi, ‘Chopped’, August 2023, @camille_halimi (Instagram)
Our Room, ‘Queer Times’, 2023, https://ourroom.org.uk/
Seleena Laverne Daye, ‘Un-Defining Queer Pocket Glossary’, 2022, https://www.seleenalavernedaye.co.uk/
Rosalie Schweiker, ‘a publication about the Whitworth Art Gallery’s Collection’, 2023, https://rosalieschweiker.info/
PART 1 video transcript
INTRODUCTIONS
00:00:06 Speaker 1
OK. Hello! My name is Rosie, and for today’s Whitworth Advent project, I’m going to be talking you through a simple book binding technique and how to make a junk journal.
Before we get started on any of the actual book binding, I just wanted to talk a bit about what a junk journal is, as well as giving some examples of items that, at the time of filming this, are currently on display in the gallery that I personally think act as really good examples of ways that you could use your junk journal.
WHAT IS A JUNK JOURNAL
00:00:43 Speaker 1
So – what is a junk journal? A junk journal is generally defined as a book or journal that is made by an individual using mostly recycled or found materials. I find junk journals really interesting because you can use materials that are already in your house to create something that is really unique to you.
I also find it really interesting to see what particular colours, or images, or text, or textures people like to include in their junk journal. I think It’s really interesting to see how people’s individual likes and dislikes and expressions get incorporated into these pieces.
This is the junk journal that I have made in this video. I just wanted to hold it up at the start of this so that you can see where we are headed. It’s relatively small, it doesn’t have that many pages, and we are going to be using a type of stitch called a saddle stitch to bind our pages together.
WHAT IS A ZINE
00:02:08 Speaker 1
Ok, what is a zine?
A zine is, usually, a self-made or self-published booklet or publication, very similar to a junk journal, but these tend to be produced in small batches, and are often used by artists or activists to help share their work or practice, or spread awareness for certain topics.
I’m going to credit all of the artists and put any relevant links in the text below this video on the blog post. So, please make sure that you follow up on those links, and those names, if you are interested in any of these pieces.
I just wanted to open them up and talk a little bit about the individual aspects of them that I find really interesting that might, kind of, jog your inspiration when you’re making your own book.
EXAMPLE ZINES
00:02:54 Speaker 1
The first zine that I wanted to pull up is called ‘Chopped’, and it is a food zine that raises money for gender affirming care.
The page that I really wanted to highlight was this one by Camille Halimi. I hope I’m pronouncing that name OK. But what I really liked about this page is the fact that it has a really, like2, cut and stick feel to it.
It feels very handmade even though it is definitely photocopied or scanned and then reprinted, so none of the actual texture is on this page. It makes the content of the book feel very accessible.
And at the time of filming this, this zine is also available to purchase in the Whitworth shop.
The next zine that I’ve got here is produced by The Men’s Room, who are a charity that help empower disadvantaged young men, trans and non-binary people.
This zine is called the Queer Times, and it has a really, really beautiful, again, kind of cut-and-stick collage style. You can also see from the way that it’s structured that this zine is actually made out of one single piece of paper.
It’s quite common for a lot of zines to be made in this way as it negates the necessity to actually bind pages together like we’re going to do today.
Another example of a folding zine that was created in tandem with the (Un)Defining Queer exhibition is this little (Un)Defining Queer Pocket Glossary.
Now, this piece is very, very, text heavy. This zine is just absolutely chock full of definitions and it’s a really, really cool way to help spread awareness of certain terms, and a really, really good companion to the (Un)Defining Queer exhibition.
One last zine that I’ve got here is a zine by Rosalie Schweiker, which was part of our Economics The Blockbuster exhibition that went on over summer, in partnership with Manchester International Festival.
Rosalie’s zine is a little bit different from the others because it was specifically commissioned by the gallery in order to question the ways that the gallery uses its collection in the present, and how collections have come to be historically.
All that aside though, I think that this zine does still do a really, really good job of feeling very personal and accessible. An example page that I really love is this page that details a collection of Rosalie’s things. She uses this to, like, lead into talking about the difference between personal collections and gallery or museum collections.
But these drawings feel, again, very homely. They feel very, very accessible to interpret, and they’re of everyday household objects and items which the viewer or reader would be able to recognise and relate to.
YOU WILL NEED
00:06:02
I think I now want to go into you will need.
So, the next question is really, what will we need to make our junk journal? Now, I have got a list of items here that I used, and I bought these as part of a relatively cheap book binding kit. You can find them very very easily online.
I will also mention when I’m listing these if there are any sort of household alternatives to these specialist tools, but there are some that I will highlight as definite must haves if you are wanting to make a book and book bind specifically.
So, one of the items that we’ve got on our list is a metal ruler. Specifically, you want a metal ruler because a plastic or wooden one might get damaged when you use a knife to clean up the edges of your pages.
We also have a whole handful of Bulldog clips. These will be used to help clamp all of your pages in place for binding, as well as cutting.
We’ve also got a good old-fashioned pair of scissors.
A craft knife.
Next, we’ve got some needles. I don’t believe that these are book binding needles specifically, but you will be needing a needle that is quite sturdy, as you’re going to be puncturing quite a lot of paper with it. A small thin needle is quite likely to bend or break when going through that much paper. Just make sure it’s a nice strong one.
We’ve also got some bookbinding thread. Now, this is one of the items that I will highlight as needing to specifically be book binding material. The difference between book binding thread and regular old thread that you might use to sew or stitch, is that book binding thread is actually coated in a film of wax.
This helps prevent the thread from fraying. Most people who will have used a needle and thread before will have had the frustration of trying to thread your needle, and the end of your thread fraying and not going through the hole correctly. The wax coating on bookbinding thread helps with that. It helps keep the strands and fibres of the thread together, but it also strengthens the thread and allows it to be able to really securely hold all your pages in place.
This item is a bone folder. The reason that this paper folder is made out of bone specifically, is that it is much less likely to cause tears or damage the paper when you use it to smooth out edges and folds. Of course, you can use any household item to help fold creases in paper, just take care not to damage your paper when you’re using other items.
You will also need an awl – that is A W, L, not, A, L, L. This is essentially just a giant pointy metal stick. We’ll be using this to help puncture holes in your pages to help guide the needle and thread through when we are stitching and binding our pages together. You can replace this with items such as drawing pins, or like cork board pins, just be careful of your fingers because obviously there is a lot less control when holding such a tiny object that doesn’t have a nice big handle.
And last but not least, since we are making a junk journal and they are made from found or recycled or scrap materials, you will need paper. Lots and lots of scrap paper. I personally like paper that has got a combination of text and images and different colours.
But if you wanted to make yourself, for example, a sketchbook, or a notebook, that you wanted your pages to be relatively plain in so that you are able to write down or draw out ideas – that is perfectly fine. Use some plain paper, use some lined paper, use some graph paper – whatever floats your boat. Specifically for this junk journal, we’re going to be using a lot of different colours and textures and materials because I personally like the way that they look and find them very visually interesting.
And it’s also just a really, really cool way to recycle a bunch of old magazines, or in this case, a combination of magazines and exhibition catalogues and old sketchbook pages.
So yeah, those are all the materials that you’re going to need to bind your book.
PART 2 video transcript
SELECTING PAPER
00:00:06
Let’s start off by looking at what kind of paper you’re going to want to use, and, if you are using scrap like me, picking out different pieces that you think will make an interesting book. It is important when you are looking through your scrap to start thinking about what sort of size you want your journal to be, and whether or not you want to have a colour scheme or pay particular attention to the material that is on the pages that you are using.
Personally, I really like having a colour scheme for the pieces that I create. I think it helps make them feel really cohesive. So, when I was looking through these scraps, I was paying particular attention to the images and colours and picked out things that were reds, blues, blacks or greys and whites. I also tend to have a preference towards making smaller books. I’ve always really enjoyed small sketchbooks or notebooks, so I knew that this journal was going to be A5 or smaller, and that really helped me figure out what portions of images I was going to be using from the pages that I had laid out in front of me, as well as the sort of size of the pieces that I would be needing – because, remember, all of these pages are going to be folded in half, so the size of whatever you’ve got laid flat in front of you, is going to half.
It’s also good to start thinking a little bit about what you might use your journal for. I’m going to talk a little bit more about that towards the end when I am putting my piece together, but if you have something in mind, perhaps think about what kind of words are on the pages that you are picking up, and whether or not they are relevant to your concept, or relevant to the ways that you want to use this journal. Once you have picked out all of the pages that you are interested in from your scrap pile, it’s time to start thinking about how you want them to layer. It’s harder to explain this than to show it, so I’m going to just sort of let the clip that I recorded of me making my layering run and speak over the top of it.
LAYERING
00:02:26
The main thing to keep in mind is that you kind of have to start viewing your pages from both sides. It is helpful to start, sort of, flipping through your pages, to gain an idea of what each double page spread will look like, and whether or not the elements on both sides of the page feel like they match up for you, or whether or not you feel like you need to include different pieces of paper. I personally really like breaking up pages with lots of text and images with just blank paper because it feels like it gives the book a nice pace, almost. It’s at this stage that I also start folding my pages in half.
I personally like doing this because it really helps me get my book nice and neatly laid before I start clamping and stitching it. I also decided that I wanted the inside of my book’s cover to have a …different lining? So, I grabbed a little glue stick and matched up two pieces of paper that were the same size, glueing what I wanted to be the inner cover of my book to the back of the outer cover of my book. It’s important to give this a minute and let it dry flat before you start putting your book back together, because you don’t want the two layers to start pulling away from each other when you bend the paper in half and then open it up again. I think that this is just a really nice way to make your book look a little bit more professional and It really helps make it feel like it’s been very cohesively tied together.
Once you’re super happy with the way that all of your pages are fitting together, and the amount of pages that you have, for the sake of making your book easier to handle I would recommend just grabbing a pair of scissors, and, at this stage you don’t need to worry about being neat, but trimming some of those excess edges away really does help in stitching it, which we’re going to be doing next.
HOLE PUNCHING
00:04:48
The next phases of our bookbinding involve some precision. I want you to get your bulldog clips and clamp along the edges of the outside of your pages. And then, grab your ruler, and measure down the middle fold that you have made in your pages. You want to measure the length of the fold you have made, and then divide that number by 6.
This will allow you to make 5 equidistant marks along the inside of what is going to be the spine or the middle fold of your book. Don’t worry about those marks being too visible, because we’re next going to get our awl and use it to puncture holes through all of the pages of your book. Make sure you’ve got something underneath your pages that you don’t mind getting marked up, because you do want this hole to go all the way through to the back of your book.
Flip that over and check that all of your holes have come through nicely, and if you are satisfied with them, it’s time to move on to stitching.
STITCHING
You are, of course, for this part going to need your needle and your thread. There are many different colours of bookbinding thread that you can get, for this piece I picked out black because I thought it would look quite nice and stark against the outer part, or the ‘spine’, of my book.
It is important to note that your thread is going to be visible, so you might want to take that into consideration when you pick out the colour, and whether or not that will work with the general theme or feel of the book that you are making.
So for this part I placed a piece of paper underneath my needle and thread because it got kind of hard to see what was going on. You’re going to want to thread your needle and leave a few centimetres of untied thread. You’re going to want to make sure that there is also no knot at the other end of the thread. This feels kind of counterintuitive, but it’s so that we can use our loose ends to tie knots on the book later on.
OK, for transparency, because this is really difficult to describe. Let’s call each individual hole 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. You’re first going to take your needle and push it through the centre hole that you have made in your book from the inside pages to the outside pages. So, push your needle from the inside of your book through hole number 3, and pull your thread through, leaving around 5 centimetres leftover on the inside of your book. Be really careful not to pull that thread through because we need it to tie a knot later on.
You’re then going to flip your book over and take your needle up to hole number 2, pushing your thread and needle through from the outside in.
Flip your book over again and we’re now going to go up to hole number one, from the inside out.
Now your stitches are going to double back on themselves, so your book should be flipped over so that the back pages are showing, or the outer part of the book is showing, and you’re going to go down from hole number 1, to hole number 2.
Hole number 2 should already have some thread coming out of it from the stitch you made earlier, so from here you’re basically just going back on yourself to the centremost hole.
When you get to the centre, be extra careful that you don’t accidentally pull the thread through that you have left out. We’re then going to repeat the process between holes 3 and 5.
So, you’re going to take your needle, which should be on the outside of your book, and push it through hole number 4, going from outside to inside.
Pull your needle through and move on to hole number 5, pushing the needle from the inside of the book to the outside of the book.
And then you guessed it, double back on yourself. Once you reach the centre hole, hole number 3, on the spine of your book, you’re going to take your needle, push it through from the inside of the book to the outside of the book, and create a knot in the thread along the outer spine of the book. Make sure the knot is nice and flush to the paper because again, keeping it nice and tight keeps it nice and secure.
Then, for a final time, you’re going to take your needle and push it back through that centre hole, pulling the knot that you just made through to the inside of the book with the needle. This last push of the needle might be quite stiff because a lot of thread is already going through that same hole, but wiggling it back and forth can really help. Just make sure you be careful of your hands.
Once the needle and thread have come all the way through, as well as the knot, you can take a pair of scissors and cut your thread from your needle, and tie an extra 2 knots over the centre of your stitches. Make sure to pull nice and tight so it’s nice and secure, and if you would like the tail ends of your thread to be shorter, you can just cut them, or tuck them in behind the thread that is holding the spine of your book together.
And there you go. You stitched a book!
CUTTING PAGES
00:10:30
After this, as you can see, I went in again with my bone folder just to make sure that the cover of my book and all of the pages within it were sitting nice and neatly.
Speaking of neatness, I think it’s time to clean up the edges of our book. This is where having a lined cutting board comes in really handy, because if you truly want your edges nice and straight, you can use the grid to help you figure out whether or not you are holding your ruler at a right angle.
Once again, I want to mention the importance of having a metal ruler as opposed to any other type of material of ruler. This basically is just so that when you are drawing your knife along the edge of the ruler, it is likely to cut into something like wood or plastic.
Also worth remembering that if you want all of your pages to line up, you need to go off of what the smallest piece of paper in your stack is. So, open your book up and have a look through it. Check where the shortest edges are coming up to, and then cut along that edge. It’s also worth just double checking that you aren’t getting too close to your binding stitches along the back of your book, as you don’t want to cut your book down so much that you end up getting too near the thread or slicing into the thread, because that will just undo all of the lovely work that you’ve just done.
It might take quite a few passes in order to get through every single layer of paper, but just keep your ruler nice and still, and make sure that your pages are clamped with some of the bulldog clips, as that will really help with getting a nice precise cut.
FINISHING TOUCHES
00:12:26
And after that, it’s pretty much up to you what you do with your new little journal. I decided that I wanted to use some of the scrap paper that I had to kind of like decorate the pages and just run through some examples of ways that you might decorate or use your journal.
You might want to take more of a diaristic approach. I found a lovely brain scan that I decided to put on the inside of the first page. I just like the idea of using this journal as somewhere to, I guess, kind of like, free write my thoughts and document them.
Equally though, you could use your journal as a photo book. I like to use these little like sticky things, like, I think they’re called photo corners. I found them online and they are often used in scrapbooking as a way to adhere images to a page without putting any adhesive onto a photograph, because that can damage the image, especially over time. So you just peel them off and slot them onto the corners of your photo and then press it down onto the page.
I’ve made books before that I have made into photo books and it’s a really, really cool way of creating a gift for somebody. With Christmas coming up, if you do know someone who’s really into photography, or really really loves keeping like family albums or photo albums, getting some really lovely prints and putting them into a book that you have made purposefully for them by hand is a really, really lovely gesture. And look at that: you’ve got the makings of a cute little photo album.
Your decoration might also be just purely aesthetic, and if you’re like me, that means finding stars and putting them everywhere cause I absolutely love stars. They are my favourite shape.
Or you might do a little bit of image and word association, finding things that are in the text of the pieces of paper that you’ve used and matching up images with them. It’s a really interesting way to create a scrapbook, or document things that you find interesting, particularly if you are a creative person whose practice is about found items or objects or gathering things.
OUTRO
00:14:42
And aside from that, You’re pretty much done. And I will leave you to decide whatever else you would like to do with your new little journal.
I find it a really, really gratifying process to make an object. It’s a really, really gratifying thing to be able to, every time you pick up something, think to yourself: I made that.
So yeah, I hope you enjoyed, I hope that my ramblings have made sense.
And there are so many more resources online, especially on YouTube, that relate to bookbinding. So, if you enjoyed this video and are looking for more inspiration, or want to learn different methods of binding, because saddle stitch is only one of them – it’s really, really easy to find just a plethora of resources.
So, happy Advent, and can’t wait to see what you do with your book.
A Place Between The Trees 
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