newspaper junk journal

The inner pages of this truly “junk” journal are made out of newspaper and the cover was a cereal box in a previous life.

I started by gluing 3 newspaper pages together to give them some sturdiness and let them dry on a washing line

Whipped up a batch of homemade gesso with following ingredients: white paint, glue and gypsum powder.Gessoed all the pages and cover, couldn’t hang this on the line because the pins would make marks (although this could be interesting too), so laid a couple of large plastic bags on the floor and laid them there until dry.

This gesso is really gritty, next time I will substitute the gypsum powder with some baby powder and see how that turns out.

I made 5 signatures of each 2 pages, I cut them to 25x18cm to fit in the cover.

I decorated the cover as followed: painted it in metallic colors and stamped some text randomly 

glued some tissuepaper on top which I stamped all over with butterflies.

I reinforced the border with some ordinary purple masking tape which on the outside was beautified with a flower stamp.

On the inside I collaged some vintage styled scraps, gave it a whitewash and stamped this heart shaped text. 

I wanted to add some beads to the binding and tried to make my own for the first time, watched some tutorials and got to work. I love how you can turn paper (scraps of paper in fact) in sturdy, wonderfully patterned beads. It was time consuming though but worth it in the end

I used a 3 hole pamphlet stitch to bind the 5 signatures, adding the beads on the outside. 

Really like the end result.  The only thing I find a little annoying is the space between the signatures on the inside binding, between 2 signatures you can see the cover. Maybe I should make the spacing between the signatures smaller? But I measure the spine and evenly divide that, otherwise it would look odd on the outside, no?  Is this something you always have with this binding? Maybe it disappears when you add to your pages?