How to make an Altered Book Junk Journal from an old book
Are you creative, love crafting, glue on your hands and glitter everywhere? And if you are also a Journal fan, then maybe making an Altered Book is something for you too! What is it and how to make an Altered Book Junk Journal like this?
what is an Altered book?
An Altered Book is freely translated: An altered book in a form of mixed media artwork that changes a book from its original form to another form, changing its appearance and/or meaning.
What can you do with this
You can do all kinds of things in an Altered Book: You can color in it, paint, cut, fold, re-bind, stamp, embroider and more. You can also cut out spaces in the book, add compartments, tags and even whole three-dimensional scenes.
Journaling terms
A Bullet Journal, Art Journal, Travel Journal or Junk Journal. There are a lot of terms and ideas of a Journal and really, what counts for each of these is: You do what you want with it. Journaling is similar to my favorite clothing style, the Bohemian Style, which is also about you feeling good in what you wear and that you see back in Journaling.
You can do what feels right, what you like and what you want in your own Journal.
The project: making an Altered book
Online I follow creative ladies who make incredibly cute Junk Journals, as well as pages’s, tags, bookmarks and basically anything else you can put in your Junk Journal. Meanwhile, I have already made two of my own with the second one already going better because I got the beauty flaws of number 1 out of it. And then I saw a video from one of the creative centipedes that I follow Barbara of 49 Dragenflies, she made an Altered Book.
Because I wanted to learn something new again, I decided to make these too.
What you need for an Altered Book?
Find an old book that you want to use for your Journal, one that may break down. I really like Vintage in my Journal myself and chose a book with a hard cover and brown old pages’s. A book can come from your closet or for example, the thrift store, a market or fair.
Choose a book that is glued, when you tear out the pages the other side will not come loose (like a bound book).
Changing the book
From the book you tear pages’s. You start with one page- tear out 8 pages’s and keep the next page. These two pages’ll become a page for your journal. Sometimes you fold a page, you cut a tag in it or make something else. You end up with 11 pages.
The pages’s you take out, you save them again, you are crafting fan or not, and you just use them honor for something else.
Make the pages’s ‘old ‘
The vintage look is something you often see with Junk Journaling. The best ink you can use for this is Distress Vintage Ink by Tim Holz, since I didn't have this at the time, I used black ink for the edges and inside of the book. Meanwhile I do have this ink, here you can read what I make with it.
Making pages
After the pages’s folded and ‘made old’ I started to decorate them, for this I usually use paper from Craft Sensations and Deco Time, both bought at action. The fun part is that you make the pages’s to your own idea. This is how I searched vintage photos’s on Pinterest that I print out with my Canon Zoemini.
Once they are done you can start filling out your Journal.
The filling of the pages’s
An (Altered Book) Junk Journal can be used to write memories, quotes, photos’s to paste or whatever you want. To be able to do this, I made for the pages’s again different tags on which I can write texts and paste pictures’s.
Give your own twist to your book
It is of course very personal what you do with your Altered Book junk journal, how you interpret it, what you write in it, you can use it as a diary, scrapbook, photo book, lists or whatever you want to do. Now you may still think, I understand nothing of it. Maybe this movie can clarify things.
The end result of my Altered Book Junk Journal:
All directions with a Journal
With an Altered Book Junk Journal you can do anything you want. And this might also be so much fun. Because not only the filling in is fun to do, the making just as much.
Precisely because you can give your own twist to it, but every time you have something unique.