If you've got a stash of paper bags — sandwich bags, glassine bags, brown paper bags, even an old gift bag — this tutorial shows you exactly what to do with them. I'm making five completely different junk journal projects from bags alone, and filming each one from start to finish so you can see the full process and follow along at your own pace. The whole collection comes together around a vintage, grungy aesthetic where nothing has to be precious and almost nothing can go wrong.
What we cover
Five bag-based projects filmed sequentially: a sandwich bag journal cover with fabric ruffle and sewn embellishments, a stacked paper bag gift set with multiple tuck spots and pockets, an altered gift bag with collaged cover and a small journal inside, a glassine bag journal with cheesecloth, ribbon, and Easter egg dyed pages, and an altered file folder journal with a decorated front panel, book page spine, and removable bow closure. The video also covers binding signatures with a three-hole pamphlet stitch, building a cohesive color palette across a collection, and tips for tying a bow that sits flat.
What you'll learn
How to prepare a paper bag as a journal cover — scrunching it by hand for texture, optionally working in a little hand lotion for pliability and a softer, less papery feel, and inking the surface for a vintage, aged look.
How to reinforce a bag cover spine with a torn strip of music paper or book page — inked, stenciled if you like, and glued directly to the bag. This is what gives the cover enough structure to hold up over time.
How to build up a collaged cover through layering, including:
- Gluing burlap or fabric as a base layer
- Adding a machine-sewn focal piece (or hand-stitched, or glue-only) on top
- Creating a paper ruffle by sewing gathered fabric directly onto the cover, or gluing it ruffled if you don't have a sewing machine
- Placing flat brads through flower centers to keep the cover surface smooth enough to write against
How to make a stacked paper bag gift set — multiple bags and a glassine envelope layered into a single gift-ready package with tuck spots and pockets throughout. This works beautifully as a Christmas gift: one pocket for a card, one for a journal, one for stickers or a tag.
Pocket-making and tuck spot construction, including:
- The three-sided gluing rule — only three sides so the opening stays functional
- Staying away from the side edges when gluing stacked bags so they don't rip and stay easy to load
How to make a glassine bag journal — folding the bag in half, cutting the opening to create a back pocket, reinforcing the cover with layered paper doilies (avocado-dyed, tea-dyed, or plain white), adding cheesecloth for texture, and sewing or stapling a ruffled lace or ribbon trim to the signature before binding.
How to make an altered file folder journal, including:
- Folding the folder to journal size
- Covering the spine with book pages, folded and glued over the edge
- Creating a front panel from layered scrapbook paper with rounded corners and inked edges
- Adding a bookplate with brads, a sewn doily-and-lace cluster, and a fabric ruffle
- Placing binding holes strategically — quite high and quite low — so the stitching helps hold the cover closed
How to bind signatures with a three-hole pamphlet stitch — needle, crochet thread, out through the middle, in through the top, out through the bottom, back in through the middle, tie off. Simple enough to do in minutes once you know it.
How to tie a bow where both tails sit flat, including:
- Starting with the right-hand piece going down (not up)
- Going under the loop and over the thumb — not over the loop — before pulling through
- Why the direction matters and what the "wrong way" bow looks like so you can recognise and fix it
How to build a cohesive collection from multiple pieces — choosing one or two anchor colors and finding the right shade within that color family. Not all blues work together; a dusty vintage navy reads very differently from a bright cobalt, and placing the wrong shade in a collection makes it jump rather than settle.
Tips & gotchas
When gluing stacked bags together, stay away from the side edges. If glue gets all the way to the sides, the bags become hard to open and are likely to rip when you try to put things in — a small margin of unglued edge makes a big difference.
Any pocket — whether on a paper bag, a gift bag, or a file folder — needs to be glued on three sides only. That fourth side is the opening. It sounds obvious but it's easy to accidentally close it off in the excitement of gluing everything down.
Keep embellishments, ruffles, and fabric away from the spine. Anything that crosses the fold will catch every time you open the journal. I check this before gluing anything permanent near that edge.
Inking the edges is the single step most worth the effort, even when it feels tedious. The difference between inked and un-inked edges on a vintage-style journal is immediately visible — inked edges look finished and intentional; un-inked edges look blunt and cut. It's boring but it's worth it every time.
If a glued cover wants to spring open while it's drying, hold it shut for a minute. Just hold it closed — show it who the boss is — and it settles.
When binding a file folder–style cover, put the top hole quite high and the bottom hole quite low. The stitching at those points acts almost like a fastening and helps keep the cover from splaying open.
Glue seeping through is far less of a problem on grungy and vintage projects than on clean, minimal ones. The surface is so busy that a little translucent bleed simply disappears.
When making a collection to sell or gift, tie everything together with one or two cohesive colors — and be specific about the shade. It's not enough to pick "blue"; you need the blue. A dusty vintage navy that reads warm and aged is a completely different character to a bright or cool-toned blue. Hold pieces next to each other before committing; if one pops out and draws your eye away from the rest, it's probably the wrong shade.
These five projects together make a natural collection, and I'm planning to sell mine as a set. But they work just as well made one at a time, or given away individually, or used as a template for making a whole batch of bag journals in an afternoon. The bags are already there; now you know what to do with them.
