Spooky Halloween Junk Journal by Julie Rohrer!

Spooky Halloween Junk Journal

Hey, everyone! Julie Rohrer of August Birdsong, one of our amazing Junk Journal Design Team Members, created a fabulous Spooky Halloween Junk Journal for us this week. As you know, we feature one new Junk Journal project each week created by one of our creative team of artists. Our Design Team Members select from the 100’s of Vintage Image Bundles on our Premium Membership Site, for their creations, in order to show you beautiful ways to use those images. We hope you will be totally inspired by this series!

Therefore, please make sure you check out the video tour at the bottom of the page…please scroll all the way down to see it. Are you ready to be inspired? I will step out of the way and let Julie tell you all about her lovely project…

Hello Everyone! I have gotten a head start on Halloween crafting with my newest visual journal, “Into Darkness We Go!” My goal was to capture the essence of Halloween with all of its creepy and magical lore as well as sharing the history of this mysterious holiday.

The title is a reference to children trick-or-treating at night on this holiday as well as the darker powers associated with Halloween, like magic, witches, death, and spirits. For the cover, I attached a black piece of stitched cardstock to the front and back of my upcycled Better Homes and Garden Sewing binder after painting the edges black. To this I added the blue and silver gelli prints. Prior to decorating the front and back covers, I used some stamps and embossing powder to add some color, texture, and framing to the black cardstock.

I used two characters from the Masquerade Ball bundle, Lady Night and the woman in a mask, as my focal points on the covers along with some ephemera, stamping, and decorative ribbon.

For the inside cover, I started with a black and white page of a flowered trellis from the Shakespearean Women bundle for the background. I used several black and white pages from various bundles in my backgrounds throughout the journal, so that when I added colored focal points or ephemera, it would really pop visually. You can see this with the painting of the black gowned woman against the yellow leaves. Then I added pumpkins, black cats, a butterfly, and some die cut flourishes in black as well. The torn-looking ephemera under the word Harvest is book binding from a book I gutted.

For the inside back cover, I added more gold embossing powder to the black cardstock base, and then glued on another black and white page from the Masquerade Ball bundle. I embellished this page with a painting of the Headless Horseman chasing Ichabod Crane from Sleepy Hollow along with other autumnal ephemera.

The first page is of a mysterious crypt that I found in the Cabinet of Curiosities bundle. I cut out the center door, so that it had a hinge and placed a vintage card of a witch on a broom (not shown) in the door opening,  (Note:  I made a short video of how I did this and another page; you can find it on Instagram under august_birdsong). I included some subtle blue green coloring using strips of gelli print for some of the geometric blocks on the crypt.

For the “Cat Band” page, I used another blue green gelli print as the background to create that eerie gloom of Halloween as well as help draw out the colors in the grackle perching above the cats. Dimensional squares helped to create depth with the foliage surrounding the bird.

Those same eerie colors were used on the Skull page to capture the emptiness of death. The skull is cut out from a larger background page found in Poe’s Halloween bundle. I found the sorceress in the archived photos found through the Friday GF blog. I used the greenery to add a pop of color as well as create a sense of depth around the skull.

The “Jack-O-Lantern” and “Frog Prince” pages are both flip pages. I used one of the marbled book pages printed on fabric as a background for the vintage witch card. The Frog Prince page is built on a gelli print that I also stenciled. I used fussy cut spiders on dimensional adhesive squares to add a little creepiness to the page. The bohemian woman is fussy cut out of a vintage photo from the archives in the blog. I also used some wings from a butterfly to turn her into a fairy.

The words “mumming” and “guising” refer to the old tradition of wearing masks or costumes to confuse any spirits wandering on Halloween night. You can see where the meaning for the words “mummy” and “disguise” originated. For these two pages, I used characters from the Masquerade Ball bundle to suggest an elegant, if not ghoulish, Halloween ball. The “Mumming” page is built on a gelli print while the “Guising” page was created using a black and white doorway from the Vintage Paris bundle. Using an exacto knife, I cut out the French doors and placed a black and white vintage photo silhouette of the wicked witch behind them.

Finally, I used a lot of fussy cut elements from various Graphics Fairy bundles to capture the images of fall and Halloween. For the Scale page, I used a die cut scale to hold the various pumpkins, fruits, and nuts. The farm boy was from the Cute Retro Halloween bundle; the boy sitting on top of the pumpkins was fussy cut out of another image from the vintage children collage sheet found under Printables at TGF.

For a behind the scenes explanation of the pages in this journal, be sure to watch my video. The journal has many more pages than I could show in this blog plus it is constructed around the story of Halloween which I narrate in the video.

SPOOKY HALLOWEEN JUNK JOURNAL SHOW & TELL VIDEO TOUR

Let’s take a tour of it together:

• A Forest Stroll
• Autumn Harvest
• Berries & Cherries
• Cabinet of Curiosities
• Cute Retro Halloween
• Fall Botanicals
• Holiday Fruit & Nuts
• Masquerade Ball
• Naturalist Halloween
• Owls & Mushrooms
• Poe’s Halloween
• Retro Halloween
• Shakespearean Women
• Vintage Paris
• Woodland Wonders

Julie’s Instagram

 Julie’s YouTube Channel

Happy Crafting!

Julie

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