My DIY Journal Project

Journaling has been a part of my life for quite a while now.  I’ve never been one to sit down and journal every day, but I do enjoy recording encouragement from the Word, music, and books, as well as things in my life that God is using to teach me.

I started my last journal in 2011 and it was only last week that I finally filled all of the pages (so you can tell how often I actually write in it!)  With that one filled, I needed to get a new one…which gave me the idea of making my own!  A friend made one recently and it looked pretty cool, so I looked up DIY Journals online and got a few directions on how to do it.

Here’s the finished product:

And the back of it:

From this angle, you can see a little more of the binding.  It uses a special stitch—called the coptic stitch--to keep it all together.  I found a youtube video on how to do it and it’s pretty straightforward. 

With this stitch, the book lays open flat and is quite sturdy.  It is important to make sure all the stitches are nice and snug.  

To make this, I used pretty common materials.   The only thing I had to buy special was some Mod Podge and hemp cord. 

Here’s what I used:

* Scrapbook paper (for making the outside and inside of  cover)
* 2 pieces of cardboard cut from a random box laying around (also for the cover)
* 33 sheets of normal typing paper (folded in 1/2 and in groups of 3.  I then poked 5 holes in the          crease for the binding)
* Scissors
* Pencil
* Awl (for pre-poking the binding holes)
* Some kind of rubber to poke into when using the awl (I just used an old flip-flop.)
* Craft Glue
* Mod Podge and sponge paintbrush (to give a finished-off look to the cover)
* Hemp Cord and needle (for the binding)

And that’s about all there is to it.  The only thing, really, that requires actual instruction in this project is the binding.  Everything else is up to your preference—the number of pages and kind of paper for the pages, the kind of cover (some websites talked of using leather, for example), and the size.

I’m pretty happy with how mine turned out!