If you've been holding onto a box of old greeting cards — the ones you can't quite bring yourself to throw away but also don't know what to do with — this tutorial is exactly where to start. I show how to turn recycled greeting cards into a small junk journal using kettle stitch binding, a technique that holds signatures together without any separate cover. Along the way there's a full flip-through of a finished journal packed with interactive elements, and a set of step-by-step binding notes you can keep for reference.
What we cover
This tutorial walks through making a nine-card journal from start to finish — covering or decorating the cards, assembling and hole-piercing three signatures, measuring and cutting thread, working through the kettle stitch binding sequence step by step, and then filling pockets and interactive elements once the journal is bound. There's also a flip-through of a completed journal showing a wide range of creative approaches to the inside pages.
What you'll learn
Three ways to approach your greeting cards, depending on what you want to keep:
- Cover all sentiments and printed text to create a pure junk journal look
- Leave everything as-is for a memory book (a whole birthday's worth of cards, say, bound and kept exactly as they arrived)
- Mix both — covering some pages, preserving sentiments you love, and adding journaling space alongside them
How to build a signature layout with mixed-size cards — choosing your tallest cards as front and back covers so the journal sits level, then grouping the remaining cards into three signatures of three cards each.
How to make a binding template for mixed-height signatures — cutting a scrap piece of paper to match your tallest card, folding it to find the hole positions, and using it consistently across all three signatures so the holes align even when the cards aren't the same height.
How to measure thread for kettle stitch binding — measuring the height of your tallest signature six times (three signatures times two) to give yourself enough length without constantly running short.
The full kettle stitch binding sequence, including:
- Starting on the last signature, entering through the top hole and leaving a tail
- Working through all three holes and looping back through the tail to anchor the first signature
- Adding each new signature by entering the top hole, passing out through the middle, looping under the previous signature's thread, and repeating for each hole
- Looping under the connecting threads between signatures rather than the signature thread itself (which is the trickiest part of the middle joins)
- Choosing to finish with an asymmetric look (one decorative thread end) or continuing back through for a symmetrical string on both the first and last signature
How to keep tension right through the binding — pulling each thread tight in the same sequence you laid it, and understanding the balance between too tight (which causes the "alligator mouth" effect where the journal fans open at the fore-edge) and too loose (which leaves too much movement between signatures).
How to make interactive elements from card pages, including:
- Simple three-sided pockets from scrapbook paper or book pages
- Flip-down and pull-out elements for layered interactivity on a single card
- Belly bands (horizontal and vertical) for adding a writing surface without committing a full page
- Folded book-page multi-pockets (three pocket sections from one folded piece)
- Sewn-down acetate pockets for a richer, more dimensional look
- Waterfall-style pull-out pads for extra writing space
- Slanted corner pockets at the back of cards to cover barcodes or blank backs
Why covering is about purpose, not perfection — you're covering only what needs to be covered. A single line of sentiment on an otherwise blank page doesn't need the whole page covered. Every layer you add is also bulk, so covering thoughtfully keeps the journal closeable.
How to sharpen a blunt craft knife blade with magazine pages — placing several magazine pages under your cutting mat before you cut gives you a noticeably cleaner edge without needing to replace the blade.
Tips & gotchas
Place your two tallest cards at the front and back of the journal. It's the only real layout rule here — a shorter card as the "cover" with taller cards sitting proud behind it looks unbalanced and feels awkward in the hand.
Decide your approach to sentiments before you start decorating. If you're making a memory book, you can skip to binding immediately — no covering needed, and you can include considerably more than nine cards. If you're making a junk journal or a mixture of both, cover the sentiments before binding, not after. It's much harder to work around bound signatures.
Fill pockets and add ephemera after binding, not before. Decorated and filled cards are noticeably bulkier than plain ones, and binding through a lot of bulk makes keeping the thread tight much harder. If you want to decorate first and bind second, that works — just know that the binding will be more challenging and you'll feel the alligator mouth effect more.
Speaking of which: the alligator mouth — where the fore-edge fans open even when the journal is "closed" — is a feature of this binding style, not a mistake. The tighter you keep your thread, the more pronounced it gets. A fully loaded journal will open on its own when you set it down; that's normal. What you're avoiding is too loose, where the signatures shift and there's visible gap between them.
Thread tension is the whole game in kettle stitch. Pull each stitch tight in the same sequence you placed it — from the knot forward — before moving to the next hole. Leaving things loose and hoping to tighten at the end doesn't work.
Measure your thread at six times the height of your tallest card. It's an approximation, and you'll likely have some left over — that's fine. Running out halfway through is not recoverable without an ugly join.
Leave a tail when you enter the first hole of the first signature. Don't pull the thread all the way down to the knot yet. You'll need that tail to loop through and anchor everything before you start pulling tight.
Before you work on your actual cards, practice the full binding sequence with three folded pieces of cardstock. The written notes help, but there's a moment about two-thirds of the way through where you need to loop under the loop between signatures rather than under the signature thread itself — and that's genuinely confusing the first time. Cardstock is forgiving. Greeting cards you've spent an hour decorating are not.
You can make it purely as an art journal with painted and collaged pages and no sentiment preserved anywhere. You can make it as a memory book with every handwritten message intact. You can give it as a gift — a small, bound collection of cards from a particular occasion, turned into something that can actually be held and leafed through rather than kept in a shoebox. And you can make it simply because the process of cutting, layering, stitching, and filling is its own reason. Once you're comfortable with the kettle stitch, it opens up well beyond greeting cards — any set of folded signatures can be bound this way, with or without a separate cover.
