If the idea of opening a box stuffed with handmade journal supplies — dyed papers, paper ruffle rolls, tassels, fabric clusters, lace, charms, and a hand-bound journal — sounds like exactly the kind of thing you'd want sitting on your craft table, this flip-through is for you. I'm showing everything inside one of the Treasure Boxes I had listed in my Etsy shop: seven boxes in total, each one filled with items I made by hand, curated for junk journaling and mixed-media work.
What we cover
A complete walk-through of one Treasure Box — every item, what it's made from, how I've used it in my own journals, and links to the tutorials behind the handmade pieces. This isn't a how-to; it's a look at what goes into a curated box of handmade journal supplies and how those pieces come together on a journal page.
What you'll learn
What's inside a Treasure Box — the full contents, walked through one by one:
- A hand-bound journal using onion-dyed, avocado-dyed, and tea-dyed papers
- A set of four handmade charms (spine jewelry, embellishments)
- A handmade tassel with a ring attachment for clipping to a spine
- A small bag of mixed embellishments — buttons, wooden pieces, beads
- A staggered scrappy booklet with a doily pocket and layered journaling pages inside
- A small handmade embellishment piece, playing card backs, a double tag, and an embossed envelope
- An origami envelope (folded from a single sheet — I have a tutorial on this)
- 2 metres of lace and 1.2 metres of metallic snap tape
- Two fabric clusters
- A tiny handmade booklet with a closure
- An adhesive corner pocket
- A mini album (suitable for photos, memory keeping, or covering with decorative paper)
- White and gold silky thread
- One metre of paper ruffle roll
- A junk mail envelope journal (my most-watched tutorial — linked below)
- A loaded pocket / slotted envelope filled with tags, handmade pieces, doilies, and images from old books
How metallic snap tape works on a journal cover, including:
- Sewing it directly onto the cover after measuring the length you need
- Using it as a decorative trim — the stitching shows and I leave it as-is
- Doubling it as a belly band closure so the journal stays shut
How paper ruffle rolls are used on journal pages, including:
- Cutting a length and gluing it along the page edge as a trim
- Using it at the bottom of a page or as part of a cluster
- Combining it with lace, ribbon, tabs, charms, and beads to build up a layered page edge — this is what inspired me to start making the ruffle rolls as a separate item
Why the silky thread needs a large-eyed needle — the thread is beautiful for binding and topping tags, but it separates into strands if the needle eye is too narrow. A needle with a wide eye keeps the thread intact as you pull it through.
What the junk mail envelope journal looks like in use — this is the project I'm most proud of from the box. The finished journal has page edges full of ruffles, lace, tabs, and little charms poking out from the sides. Seeing all of that texture while you're writing is, genuinely, what keeps me coming back to the page.
Tips & gotchas
When you cut a length of paper ruffle roll for a page, glue the cut ends down straight away. The ruffle is sewn, not fused, so the ends can look like they might unravel — but once you've glued them to the page or into a cluster, they hold beautifully. (And if you've ever tried to intentionally unravel a sewn ruffle and failed, you'll know they're actually pretty stubborn.)
For the silky white-and-gold thread, use a needle with a noticeably large eye. The thread is made of multiple fine strands and they'll split apart if you're forcing them through a small eye. A tapestry needle or any large-eyed bookbinding needle works well.
The metallic snap tape looks more complicated than it is. Measure your cover, sew it on, done. I didn't feel the need to cover the stitching — it just reads as part of the texture. The snap closure means it also functions as a belly band, which is a genuinely useful thing to have on a softcover journal that you're filling with pockets and loose ephemera.
Each box was different in its specifics — I used different papers for the ruffle rolls, different images from old books for the loaded envelopes — so no two boxes were identical. The structure and the handmade care were consistent; the details were not.
I don't have a tidy answer. But I do think there's something in making things by hand — in filling pages with your thoughts and surrounding them with beautiful, tactile, handmade objects — that's worth doing for its own sake. These boxes were made with that in mind: not just supplies, but an invitation to sit down and make something that's entirely yours.
