If you've been collecting washi tape and wondering what to actually do with it all, this video is for you. I show how to turn washi tapes and washi tape stickers into pages you can bind directly into a junk journal — either as single peelable supply pages or gathered into a small companion booklet. The pages work beautifully in a personal journal, a travel journal, or a journal you're making to sell.
What we cover
I walk through a haul of new washi tape sets — including floral, botanical, vintage insect, cat, Alice in Wonderland, and adventure-themed collections — and then make washi tape journal pages live on camera using a plastic page divider as the base. I also show how these same pages can be gathered and bound into a mini companion booklet using a three-hole pamphlet stitch.
What you'll learn
How to make a washi tape page for a junk journal, using a plastic page divider as the base — stiff enough to bind into a journal, smooth enough to peel tape off cleanly.
How to plan your layout before committing, including:
- Laying tapes down without sticking to test the visual arrangement
- Placing the two outer tapes first to establish even spacing, then filling in the middle
- Swapping in tapes from your collection when a set is missing a piece
How to turn single pages into a companion booklet — folding and trimming pages to a consistent size, then binding them together with a three-hole pamphlet stitch so the whole thing can live inside a journal as a pull-apart sticker and tape resource.
Why plastic page dividers work so well for this — the right material holds its shape when bound, lies flat, and releases washi tape cleanly without tearing or stretching. A flimsy plastic sleeve won't do the same job.
How to build a cohesive page from mixed sets — pulling one tape from a different collection to fill a gap without breaking the overall palette, using symmetry at the top and bottom to anchor the arrangement visually.
A look at the washi tape sticker format — how sticker rolls differ from traditional washi tape, why the transparent backing makes them especially useful on book pages, and how layering transparent stickers lets you build up depth without obscuring what's underneath.
The washi tape collections shown, each with its own character:
- Petals and Parchment — botanicals, postage stamp stickers, gold-foiled lettering
- Delicate Floral Wreaths — large wreath stickers, gold foil on transparent backgrounds
- Green Oasis — plant and herb imagery, gold foiling, fully transparent stickers
- Waves of Rebun — dark, moody tones inspired by a Japanese island, heavy gold foiling across all four tapes
- Vintage Vibes — insects, butterflies, bees, ladybugs, wide tape with handwriting-style text
- Chonky Cat — cat illustration stickers and tape, including a "books" motif that's hard to resist
- Flower Corridor PET tape — wide clear tape with a floral design, almost like high-quality sellotape; available in both PET and standard washi formats
- Adventure — five-tape set with camping, hiking, and travel imagery, good for outdoors-themed journals
- Alice in Wonderland — a natural for themed journals, pairs well with a range of cover palettes
Tips & gotchas
The base material makes or breaks this project. A stiff plastic page divider — the kind used in document wallets — holds its shape well enough to be bound into a spine. A soft, flimsy plastic sleeve will flop and can't be stitched cleanly. Before you start, flex whatever you have in hand: if it doesn't hold a fold, it won't hold up in a journal.
Lay your tapes out before you stick anything down. Washi tape is forgiving — you can peel and reposition — but having the full arrangement visible before committing means you catch awkward gaps or clashing widths early, before you've pressed anything firmly in place.
Start with the two outermost tapes. Once those are down, you have a frame and you can judge the spacing for everything in between. Filling from the outside in produces much more even results than placing tapes one after another from top to bottom.
If a tape goes on crooked, just peel it off and try again. These pages don't have the same adhesion pressure as tape on paper, so the tape won't grip harder over time — it will peel cleanly whenever you're ready to lift it.
Finally, match the page size to your journal before you start cutting. I use a finished page from a previous project as a cutting guide so everything stays consistent, especially when pages will be bound together as a booklet.
Every tape on the page is there to be used — peeled off and placed somewhere in the journal where it belongs. The page itself is the supply. There's something about that idea, the whole thing being both decoration and raw material at once, that I find genuinely satisfying to make. If you have a stack of washi tape sitting in a drawer waiting for the right project, this might be exactly where it goes.
