How to make an Altered Book Journal- DIY with explanation

Recycling a book in a very special way, that’s an Altered Book Journal. Today I explain step by step how to make an Altered Book Journal. However, as with the Bullet Journal, you can do whatever you want with it.

An Altered Book Journal

Maybe you have a Bullet Journal, a Junk Journal or a scrap book, but now you want something different. Then making an Altered Book Journal is a great idea. An Alterd Book Journal is basically a second life for an old book. In it you can paste, tear, disk and cut.

You can use it as a diary, as a book for quotes, memories or a photo book, whatever you want.

It’s your journal

What it is with an Altered Book Journal, the same as with all those other Bullet Journals, it’s your Journal and you do what you want with it. So I certainly don’t want to impose my will here, but show here (and on YouTube) how I make my Altered Book Journal and hope to inspire you with it. And how you fill them in is up to you.

Junk Journal

Now I already made an Altered Book Junk Journal once, after videos’s on Youtube. I followed the directions step by step and really enjoyed making and fleshing this out. Now, however, I am to the point where I can also make my own pages’just fine, which is why I enjoy doing it so much.

Pick a book

What you need is a book. Of course, you don’t just grab a book from the shelf. I read a lot and I get my books from the library, or I share them with others again.

So I don‘t often have a book ‘over’. However the book I used now for my Altered Book Journal was such a bad book, it doesn’t happen to me often, but in this one I really didn’t see any point in passing it on, so I figured I could use it just fine to craft in.

What you need

An old book
Glue
Scissors
Paper
fabric
washitape
etc, etc

How to start

You take the book and start at the first real page. You can decorate the pages for this later with fun paper, fabric or stickers. What I did was to fold the first page to the outside, then I tore out six pages’s and use the seventh page as a Journal page again.

I also use the eighth page as a Journal page, after this tear out another six pages’s, use the next one again as a Journal page etc. If you don&#8217t understand any of this (I can well imagine) just take a look at the video’s at the bottom of this article, here I explain it clearly.

Vintage pages

Since I have a Vintage Bullet Journal, I am all about the Vintage style. I recently bought a paper block Vintage at Action. And thought how fun it was also I my Altered Book, to continue with this Vintage Theme. I use an Altered Book Journal to write in memories, quotes that inspire me or paste pictures’s.

So I make sure I have space on one side each time anyway where I can write, paste or put something away. But a page that you ‘re just beautiful’ makes is also very cool to do. Surely these are books you will be proud of later on.

How to proceed

You can now have fun filling out your Altered Book Journal yourself. Figure out for yourself how you make your pages. But pay close attention to which pages you take out and which you leave in place. Look for information on my Youtube channel.

Have you torn out pages’s then you can decorate the remaining pages’s fun, make tags, add stationery, make space for photos’s just what you want!