If you've been looking for a craft subscription box that actually delivers the kind of supplies junk journalers and paper crafters reach for — vellum stickers, mulberry paper, dried flowers, washi tape, wooden rubber stamps — the Your Creative Studio box might be worth a closer look. In this video I unbox one of their vintage-themed boxes, go through every item inside, and then sit down and use the goodies to build out a journal page on the spot.
What we cover
I open the box piece by piece, talk through what each item is and how I'd use it in a junk journal or planner, then work through a live creating session — making a little charm from the vellum cards and cereal-box cardstock, trying out the wooden stamp, layering in the see-through stickers, tucking the dried flowers into a pocket, and pulling the whole thing together on a journal page.
What you'll learn
How to back and seal a vellum piece to turn it into a charm or bookplate, using cereal-box cardstock as backing and contact paper in place of a laminator — cut it out, then ink around the edges to seal and finish the piece from both sides.
Why contact paper is a practical swap for laminating, including:
- When you don't want to get the laminator out for a small scrap project
- How it holds light pieces like vellum cards well enough for a charm or tag
How to make a simple paper charm without specialist tools, including:
- Poking a hole and threading through a tab
- Where you'd add an eyelet later if you wanted a more finished look (the hole-first approach means you can always go back and do that)
How to use vellum stickers to add interest without weight — I love these on baking paper pages and on book-page backgrounds because they're semi-transparent and sit lightly on whatever's underneath.
Why I leave dried flowers in their original bag — keeping them sealed preserves the arrangement and the flowers themselves, and tucking the whole bag into a pocket or behind a page element looks intentional rather than lazy.
Using a wooden rubber stamp for journal pages and page headings, including a quick note on what to do when your ink pad is running low.
How to layer subscription box goodies into a collage page, including:
- Sticky notes and little paper quote cards as base layer elements
- See-through stickers on top of book pages or baking paper
- A butterfly embellishment placed to interact with a flower stamp
Tips & gotchas
When your ink pad is fading, don't fight it — switch to a darker colour. I tried using a near-empty brown pad on the wooden stamp and it wasn't giving me much. Switching to black gave a clean impression straight away. A weak pad doesn't mean your stamp isn't working; it just means the pad needs replacing or you need a colour with more pigment.
Contact paper is genuinely useful for quick laminating jobs. It's not a perfect substitute for a proper laminator, but for small pieces — a vellum card, a little charm back — it does the job without the setup. The key thing I do afterwards is ink around all the cut edges, which seals the layers together and gives the piece a finished look rather than a raw one.
With the dried flowers, resist the urge to open the bag. The bag itself becomes part of how you use them — slide it into a pocket, let it sit visible behind a tag, tuck it under a page. The moment you tip them out they're harder to work with and easier to damage.
One thing I ran into while trying to back the vellum cards back-to-back: the images weren't perfectly centred on each card, so two cards layered together didn't align. Worth checking before you glue, and easier to just work with a single card backed onto cardstock than to wrestle with misalignment after the fact.
The "I don't want to use them up" feeling is real — I talked about this while working through the stickers. The only thing that helps me is reminding myself that the point of having them is to use them. Pick one piece, commit to it, and the rest follows.
The vintage floral theme here gave me a page that held together with very little planning, which is exactly the kind of low-friction creative session that makes crafting enjoyable rather than stressful.
