Winter Season Junk Journal by Gina Testa!

Winter Season Junk Journal

Hey, everyone! Gina Testa of Gina Makes It, one of our amazing Junk Journal Design Team Members, created a fabulous Winter Season 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 Gina tell you all about her incredible project…

December is here and with it, a new journal. I simply love the process of creating a journal, especially figuring out the overall aesthetic to guide my creativity throughout the month. I quickly determined I wanted the beauty of December to shine through and decided to make a hard-covered journal using an old book I painted and treated with crackle finish. I liked the idea of creating a door with a wreath on the cover, so I added two pieces of rectangle chip board painted and treated with the crackle finish and glued it to the front. I glued a vintage button as the doorknob and decided to add a wreath with some trimmed mini pine cones and dried berries I had collected from a recent trip to the forest.

I knew I did not want this journal to be especially large since it would only be for one month, so I decided to make two smaller signatures. I am a sucker for creamy neutrals, so I printed every paper in the Vintage Paperie themed bundle on copy paper utilizing the double-sided print feature on my printer. I also included vintage wrapping paper, napkins, and book pages in each signature, as well as a brown plaid digital paper from the London Detective bundle.

I began looking through the themed bundles and downloading images I felt aligned with my view of December. I also performed searches within the Membership site for owls, poinsettias, holly, evergreen trees, and pine cones, as these were the items I really wanted to incorporate. I downloaded the images and printed them on both coffee-dyed copy paper and matte photo paper.

I lined the inside cover of my journal with stained cardstock and added a piece of vintage lace and a hankie adorned with poinsettias to create a pocket. For the inside back cover, I printed poinsettias from the Retro Christmas bundle at various sizes, fussy cut, and applied gold gilt to the edges before gluing them down vertically on top of an old quilt pattern. I added some evergreen clippings from a tree in my backyard.

I don’t like to “pre-decorate” my journals too much as it tends to stifle the creative process for me when I’m actually using it. But, I do like a sense of cohesiveness within a journal, so I decided to focus on making journaling cards to use during the journaling process. I downloaded and cut images from the Christmas Scraps, Pastel Christmas, and Victorian Christmas themed bundles, adding them to dyed cardstock and embellishing with vintage lace and book pages. I transformed each journaling card into a mini ornament to subtly tie in the December tradition of hanging ornaments on a tree.

I made two tags complete with sari silk toppers using coin envelope templates downloaded from the Snow Birds themed bundle. I also built a little embroidered pocket to hold a stack of fussy-cut ephemera I chose from the bundles, as well as the free portion of the Graphics Fairy site.

I love incorporating aspects from nature into my journals, so I used some dried tree and boxwood cuttings on a few pages, including on an envelope I made using the owl digital paper in the Birds Watcher’s Bliss themed bundle. I also created a little booklet folder using elements from the Dicken’s Christmas themed bundle because I already had plans to re-listen to “A Christmas Carol” this season and knew it would be just perfect when documenting the experience!

 WINTER SEASON JUNK JOURNAL SHOW & TELL VIDEO TOUR

Let’s take a tour of it together:

Here is a full list of all the bundles I used:

• Bird Watcher’s Bliss
• Christmas Scraps
• Dicken’s Christmas
• Holiday Dogs & Cats
• London Detective
• Pastel Christmas
• Red & Green Ephemera
• Retro Christmas
• Snow Birds
• Stained Glass Windows
• Victoria Christmas Scraps
• Vintage Paperie
• Wreaths & Sprigs

Find me on YouTube, Etsy and Instagram

I can’t wait to start working in this journal!

Gina 

Check out the Graphics Fairy Premium Membership Site HERE!