Hey everybody, Margarete here. Today I'm talking  about a clever idea that helps you create   if you are intimidated by a blank journal page.  Today I want to revisit an idea that I've talked   about before of using junk mail to create a small  journal that you collage or create art on top of.   The purpose of this is to give yourself a  little bit more permission to experiment   and try things that you normally would not.  Often times when you have a journal with blank   white pages you are really reluctant  to to jump in there and get going,   and if in this case if you use something like junk  mail, it's something that you've taken out of the   recycle bin or taken out of the trash that would  normally get thrown away, and it does not have,   it does not hold any emotional attachment to you.  It's not a beautiful perfect journal. It doesn't   have a gorgeous cover. It doesn't have anything  that would stop you from feeling guilty if you   work in it or create something that you  don't really love but you can just throw   it away if you if you decide to. Let me turn on  my overhead camera and I'll show you what i mean.   So here on my desk I have some examples of some  journals that have been gifted to me that are so   pretty that I have anxiety about starting them and  doing anything in them. This one is beautiful red   leather and then on the inside are pages that  have been hand bound into this pretty notebook This one i'm using so far as a place to hold  my tags but it also is a really beautiful   handmadethe paper is handmade journal, and  honestly I don't know if i will ever have the   courage to to do anything in this book because  it's just so pretty and I'm afraid of ruining   it. So i wanted to show you something that I have  shown before in a video but i wanted to revisit   it because I think it's an important lesson or  an important thing to to show you and that is   making pages of journals using junk mail. So i  have a bunch of little little art journals that   i have made using junk mail.

Here is the kind  of mail that i'm talking about. So often   they are printed on very sturdy, heavy  cardstock and these ones are nice when they can   fold because then you can choose basically where  you want to put the stitch when you're putting it   in a signature and then you have this really cool  thing that will open into a whole bunch of pages. Here's an example of one that i put together   just with a three point and this  is a five point pamphlet stitch. So this is just a piece of washi  tape and this is holding a very thick advertisement I like to put in smaller sizes. Lots of credit card offers. Then this paper  is thinner and it folds out over here. Here is another just a just a flyer  and in the middle I have an envelope. So this was a catalog Garnet Hill. So now let  me show you what i have done with some of these. With this one, all I did was collage on top  with papers. That's it. And these are not even   my best papers. They're just papers, just stuff  my kids doodled on things that I cut out of of   home improvement magazines. Sometimes a couple  of receipts. Stuff from my kids coloring books. This was just from drop paper so something  that i was cleaning off my rubber stamp.   Here's an envelope one side and the other  this was a long envelope if you see and i   just put washi tape over the sticky  side and put it in put it in here. Okay, so there's really nothing special  about this little book. I just added papers   and things cut out from from  brochures and magazines and that's it. This are these are one cent  postage stamps real postage stamps. if you this is fun... I recommend this, even  though, well, you're just pretty much throwing money   away, but if you go to the to the USPS to  the post office you could buy a sheet of 20   one-cent stamps for 20 cents, right, and then you've  got a whole bunch of things to play with. So I   don't know if they have these cats anymore,  but anyway. Okay, so this one is just paper,   right? So now this one is paper with a little bit  of acrylic paint and rubber stamping.

So this one   I just literally took my finger in paint and went  around the frames of some of these pages and then   I experimented with stencils and rubber stamps  and this does not even look good honestly to me. But i didn't care. I was just experimenting. I  wanted to play with color and see what happened. And you know, if you could just do something with  your finger and just it's like finger painting,   right, and you just go in and quickly do things. You feel like you've accomplished something and   it just gives you the chance, the opportunity  to play. This, I remember that I used gesso because   you know how like magazine papers could be  very slick and shiny and if you try to paint or   do some kind of stenciling it sometimes  it doesn't work, so i put gesso over that so rubber stamp and rubber stamp. You can  see it's just acrylic paint. That's all it is. Stickers from Trader Joe's. Here's another Trader Joe's. Coloring book page from my kids. Here's another envelope. You see   how I just used a pretty piece of  washi tape there, and rubber stamped. A piece of map from the San Diego Zoo and over that  i put a napkin and more acrylic, more rubber stamp. Okay, so i wasn't trying to make anything  beautiful with this. I just wanted to play.  That was the whole reason, right. Okay, so  far I've shown you one, two, three, and here's the last one that I have. This one  is really heavy duty paint and i also used. What is that called? It's the pastemodeling  paste. I used stencils and modeling paste. So here I also went around the edges just  with acrylic paint probably in a brown, and i did some gesso. And I did some, I don't  even know what colors. How did i get this color? I did stenciling, I did rubber stamping,  and at the very base, i started with   a few pieces of magazine or advertisement  or something, right, and then painted over them.

Here's another one. This is god-awful ugly.  Honestly, it's just color thrown in your face and   um that's okay. What i really wanted to  experiment with was a darker background with a   white pen because i've not had success finding a  good white pen that writes on dark backgrounds. So that was the whole thing make something  crazy and then use a white pen to experiment   what it looks like. So here I haven't  gotten very far. I've only done these few pages   but you can still see the pieces of junk  mail underneath. Super sturdy. This is super   sturdy so it's going to last for layers. Putting as many layers as I would like. Okay, this one I used a long-arm stapler  instead of a pamphlet stitch so it even   makes it even more simple to do if you  have access to a stapler that will fit, where you can slide your  papers into staple. All right, so here's what the cover looks like. I'm happy  with the cover. It's also kind of a mess   of color and experimentation but again,  that's what it's for. This is what it's for. I am not a color expert. I am more comfortable with  collaging papers only, so I do need a lot of of   motivation to play with color and I'm not going to  play with color in a beautiful journal like this. I'm gonna play it with color in something that  I don't feel like I'm ruining anything because   if in the worst case, i can just throw  this away and I won't feel guilty about it, right? So that is why i recommend  that you play with junk mail. Thanks for watching. :-).