Why This Site Exists
Most junk journals do not stall because the person making them lacks taste. They stall on the first page. The journal is new, the paper is pretty, and the fear of ruining it is bigger than the wish to start. Or the page gets made, and it looks messy, and nobody can say why.
Paper Hazel is here for that first page and the ones after it. Every idea on the site is written up as layers you can repeat: what goes down first, what goes on top, where the small bits sit, and which glue keeps it flat.
Who Writes This
I am Hazel Brooks. I started my first junk journal in 2019 from a charity-shop hardback, a stack of receipts and a glue stick that dried out halfway through. Since then I have filled more than 30 journals and scrapbooks: travel ones, gift albums for friends, a chunky one that no longer closes and taught me more about page thickness than anything else.
Almost everything I use is printed at home on an ordinary inkjet. That is why the articles here talk about paper weight and print settings as much as colours. A printable that looks sharp on a screen and comes out blurry on the page is not a good printable.
How Ideas Are Chosen
An idea makes it into an article only if it clears the same checks:
- You can repeat it with what you have. Envelopes, receipts, old book pages and a home printer come first; a shopping list comes last.
- The layers are named. Background, main piece, small details, words — in that order, with a rough count for each.
- It survives the journal closing. If a layout makes the spine bulge or the page curl, the article says so and shows the fix.
- Printables are checked printed, not only on screen. Paper, setting and size are written next to them.
- Ephemera looks hand-drawn or genuinely vintage. Sheets that look machine-made do not get recommended.
What You Will Find Here
Junk journal layouts and supplies, scrapbooks for couples, friends, birthdays and trips, journaling pages and prompts, printable stickers and papers, and the paper crafts that sit around them: doodles, lettering, bookmarks, paper dolls, coloring pages and gift tags.
Affiliate Links, Plainly
Some links on this site are affiliate links: if you buy through them, the site earns a small commission at no extra cost to you. That pays for the site. It does not decide what gets recommended, and many of the ideas here use nothing you need to buy.
Get In Touch
If a layout or printable did not work the way the article said, I want to hear about it. Email [email protected].