Raiding the cereal box stash

Dear friend,

There's almost always a cereal box somewhere on its way to the recycling. I'd been saving mine for a while — panels from different boxes, all slightly different sizes, piling up in a corner — and eventually I sat down to see how far I could actually take them.

The answer turned out to be: pretty far. Cover, lining, binding, beads, and a journal I'd genuinely want to use. The whole thing is made from cardboard, covered in whatever you have on hand — fabric scraps, napkins, packaging paper, old book pages, junk mail envelopes — and bound together with baker's twine using a wraparound method I worked out myself. No holes punched, no needle-and-thread binding in the traditional sense. Each panel wraps and knots, and every new panel ties to the last one. When you're done, pages can be added or removed freely, which makes it a very forgiving kind of journal to keep.

While I was filming this, I flipped through one I made about ten years ago. It had embroidered panels, spray-painted leaves, hand-stitched pockets, painted tags. I hadn't touched a sewing machine yet when I made it. It's a small time capsule now, and I don't think I'd have called it finished at any point along the way — it just grew. That's the thing about a journal like this. It doesn't need to be complete before it's useful. It only needs to be started.

If you'd like to make one of your own, here's the whole thing — start to finish.