After ignoring it for two and a half years, my horse junk journal is finally finished. My second junk journal both springs from and improves on the things I did with my first one. It taught me some new lessons as well.

In the spring of 2021, I assembled the signatures, collected every horsey paper item I owned, and started decorating the pages. Working from previous experience, I chose cardstock for my pages so they could support heavier decorations and avoided putting bulky materials on the back of my writing spaces.

Decorating the pages before you bind them may seem backwards, but it has the advantage of guaranteeing your cover will fit your finished signatures. I discovered there are some disadvantages to this method as well.

One of them was having nothing left to put on the cover. Because I didn’t think about it until the signatures were decorated, I used up all my best material in the journal itself. I had to get creative with my cover design. While I’m pleased with the results, I had plenty of gorgeous postcards I could have used if I had just thought ahead.

Another disadvantage was not being able to use coptic stitch for my binding. I like my journals to lie flat when open and know from experience that this particular binding style is perfect for that. However, you have to be able to get the spine end of the signatures close together for this stitch. My decorated signatures were much too wide for this binding method.

One of the new things I’m trying in this journal is including blank labels and tags as spots for putting the date of the journal entry. I often forget that I can add more to a page after I start using it, so I have to really think about it to make sure I leave myself unfinished or blank spaces.

As with every creative project, I tried new things and learned some lessons along the way. The goal is to remember what happened so I can do even better with my next journal.

What have your creative projects taught you?