If you've ever found yourself sitting with boxes of craft supplies you bought with the best intentions — the flowers you were going to layer onto a chunky journal, the jewelry you planned to pull apart for beads, the magazine pages you saved because the pictures were too good to throw away — this video is familiar territory. I'm going through two destash boxes here: bits and pieces from my stash that I've held onto, tried to find a use for, and finally decided to pass on.
What we cover
A flip-through of two destash boxes filled with journal-making supplies: fake flowers, broken and whole jewelry pieces, gold beads, pen separators, coffee filters, blank cards, envelopes, and a generous collection of paper ephemera — including pages from Reader's Digest books, German Flow magazine, the Book of Paper Lovers, and a striking calendar page I almost kept. The second box mirrors the first closely, with a few different pieces mixed in.
What you'll learn
How fake flowers can be used in journal making — you don't need to use them whole. Pulling them apart gives you individual petals and layers that sit flat on a cover; cutting them down works well for smaller accent pieces.
Repurposing old and broken jewelry for journals, including:
- Breaking apart necklaces to harvest individual beads (seed beads, gold beads, decorative findings)
- Using jewelry chain or findings as cover embellishments
- Treating a DIY bracelet kit as a source of loose components rather than making the bracelet itself
How pen separators — those little rings you stack between pens — can be reused as journal embellishments. They're not something most people would look at and think "journal supply," but they work. I bought mine specifically for this purpose and never got around to it, which is why they're in the destash — but the idea is solid.
Using book pages and magazine pages as journal covers and ephemera, including:
- Reader's Digest pages with interesting illustrations (particularly good for Halloween-themed journals)
- Pages from German Flow magazine — the writing you can't read becomes part of the aesthetic, and the imagery is beautiful
- Pages from the Book of Paper Lovers with instructions and decorative prints
- Catalog pages with strong visual interest
- A single calendar page saved purely for the photograph of trees on it
Why making journals in batches changes how you use your stash. When I started out, I'd buy broadly and accumulate. Over time I've found my style — I know what I actually reach for and what just sits in a box. These destash boxes are the result of that shift. Making journals in batches makes it much clearer, much faster, which materials you're genuinely drawn to and which you're keeping out of hope rather than habit.
What a ready-made op-shop cover can offer — I picked one up with lace sandwiched between layers of cardstock, thinking I'd alter it into a journal. It's a good reminder that secondhand shops are worth checking for covers that are already halfway there.
Tips & gotchas
Fake flowers are more versatile than they look when you're staring at them whole. The ones that feel too big or too "crafty" for your style often become perfectly usable once you pull them apart — individual layers, separated petals, small cut-down pieces. If a flower doesn't feel right as-is, take it apart before you destash it.
Old jewelry is genuinely useful even when it's broken, low quality, or just not your taste to wear. A necklace you'd never put on can give you thirty seed beads for journal pages. A bracelet-making kit you'll never assemble is a bag of findings waiting to be scattered across a cover. The test isn't "would I wear this" — it's "are there interesting components in here."
The pen separator trick is one of those ideas that sounds odd until you see it. If you come across them cheaply, they're worth picking up with journals in mind — circular, stackable, and easy to attach.
Flow magazine pages (especially the German editions) work beautifully in journals partly because you can't read them. The foreign text becomes texture and visual interest rather than something to be read. Same goes for pages in other languages from secondhand books — don't pass them over just because you don't understand the words.
For paper ephemera in general: if you're pulling pages from old books or magazines, pull more than you think you need. Pages that feel marginal on their own often pair well with something else once you're actually making. It's much easier to have a stack to pull from than to wish you'd kept one more page.
The pink flowers I envisioned on a chunky lace-covered journal were a perfectly good idea; they're just not what I reach for anymore. Knowing that is useful. These destash boxes are how I keep my workspace honest, and doing them in pairs, like this, makes the process feel manageable rather than overwhelming.
