Color & Crafts
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• Scrapbooking

DIY Colorful Embellishments for Your Junk Journal

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The irony of the "Junk Journaling" community is that beginners often spend hundreds of dollars at craft stores buying expensive, perfectly manufactured "vintage" stickers and pristine ephemera specifically designed to look like garbage.

This completely defeats the purpose of the art form.

A junk journal is supposed to be a chaotic, deeply personal, heavily textured celebration of the mundane. It is a place to document beauty found in the forgotten corners of your daily life. It is an art form rooted entirely in aggressive upcycling. If you want a junk journal that truly looks organic, colorful, and unique, you must stop buying embellishments and start building them out of literal trash. Here is how.

1. The Paint-Chip Mosaic (Free Color Blocks)

The greatest, most colorful free asset available to any crafter is the paint chip aisle at the hardware store. The colors are mathematically perfect, the cardstock is incredibly heavy and high-quality, and they cost absolutely nothing.

The Embellishment: The Hexagon Mosaic

  1. Gather a handful of paint chips in a cohesive analogous palette (e.g., 5 variations of teal, and 5 variations of navy blue).

  2. Buy an inexpensive 1-inch hexagon paper punch from a craft store.

  3. Punch dozens of solid-color hexagons out of the paint chips.

  4. The Application: When you have a blank, boring page in your journal, use a glue stick to tile the colorful hexagons across the page like a bathroom floor. Leave tiny, 1-millimeter gaps between the hexagons so the background page shows through like grout. It creates a stunning, heavy, textured honeycomb of color.

2. Security Envelope Pockets (Hidden Patterns)

Before you throw your utility bills and bank statements into the recycling bin, look closely inside the envelopes.

To prevent you from holding a check up to the light and reading the numbers through the paper, banks print complex, often incredibly beautiful security patterns (dots, cross-hatches, waves) on the interior of envelopes, usually in stark, heavy blue or black ink.

The Embellishment: The Privacy Pocket

  1. Carefully tear the envelope open and lay it flat so the blue patterned side is facing up.

  2. Use strong, bright watercolor paints (like neon pink or mustard yellow) to paint a sloppy, wet wash directly over the blue security pattern.

  3. Once dry, fold the painted envelope in half, creating a small pocket.

  4. The Application: Glue the pocket into your journal. You now have a custom, brightly colored, heavily patterned envelope to hold movie tickets, secret journaling tags, or dried flowers. The harsh blue security pattern adds a gritty, industrial feel to the bright watercolor.

3. Fabric Scrap Fabric Tabs (Sensory Texture)

Junk journals should not just look beautiful; they should feel interesting. A book made entirely of flat paper is a boring book. You need textiles.

If you sew or quilt, you have a bin of useless fabric scraps. If you don't sew, go to a thrift store and buy the ugliest, most brightly colored 1980s floral shirt you can find for two dollars.

The Embellishment: The Page Tab

  1. Rip—do not cut!—the fabric into long, thin, 2-inch strips. Ripping the fabric exposes the raw, frayed, messy threads, which is the exact aesthetic you want.

  2. Fold the fabric strip in half.

  3. The Application: Staple the folded fabric directly to the outside edge of a journal page so it sticks out of the book when the book is closed.

  4. If you attach five of these bright floral fabric tabs down the right edge of the book, acting like alphabetical index tabs, the entire book will look incredibly thick, colorful, and heavily textured before you even open the cover.

4. The "Franken-Label" (Layered Clusters)

A single piece of trash is boring. Three pieces of trash stapled together is art.

If you have tiny, useless scraps on your desk (a used postage stamp, a corner of a ripped receipt, a tiny piece of purple tissue paper), you can bind them together to create a "Franken-Label" or a "Cluster."

The Embellishment: The Cluster

  1. The Base (Texture): Start with something rough and neutral, like a torn 2-inch square of brown corrugated cardboard from an Amazon box.

  2. The Color Pop: Lay a bright, messy scrap of colored tissue paper or a neon paint chip perfectly off-center over the cardboard.

  3. The Focal Point: Place the most interesting tiny object on top (the used, colorful postage stamp, or a shiny gold foil wrapper from a piece of candy).

  4. The Binding: Do not use glue. Slam a heavy-duty office stapler right through the center of all three pieces.

The Application: You have just created a thick, 3D, highly colorful, industrial embellishment in 30 seconds. Glue the entire cluster to the corner of a photograph in your journal to act as a heavy, textured anchor.

Conclusion

A junk journal is a rebellion against perfection.

Do not spend $20 on a packet of pristine, mass-produced floral stickers. Look in your recycling bin. Look at the junk mail on your counter. Look at the ripped seam of an old shirt. The most beautiful, colorful, and deeply textured embellishments in the world are already sitting in your house, waiting to be rescued.

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