telophase | DIY journal

Feeling the need to make things with my hands instead of digitally lately (plus exploring ideas for ephemera for a play-by-mail game

yhlee and I are doing), I've been downloading junk journal, folio, and folder kits from Etsy. While I'm not into the full junk journal aesthetic*, there's a lot of interesting ways to piece together books, boxes, folders, etc. and nothing says I have to use all of the vast amount of manufactured ephemera that come with the digital kits.

ANYWAY! After I made a first test journal, I wanted to make another one, and make it for someone else. It occurred to me that a Tarot-themed notebook/journal would be appreciated by

yhlee and so that's what I did.

(re: my footnotes) Yes! There is a word on the cover! It is labeling what the journal is so you can tell at a glance! ;)

Edge-on you can see the various signatures and the ink I used to distress the edges to make it look Old and Mystical (tm).

The back! The lighting in my office/craft/computer room isn't great, so I can't tell if I actually grabbed differently-colored book corners, or if it's just the light.

My very first attempt at Coptic stitch! I have no idea why I decided to sew the top three bindings as a unit and the bottom three as a separate unit. If I'd done them all as one, there would have been more of the pretty stitching, instead of one middle row of pretty stitching to two outer rows of not-so-pretty stitching. Oh well, live and learn.

A "tuck spot" as the junk journalers call it. With mini Tarot zines tucked into it because I needed something to tuck into the tuck spot. The parallel slashes are meant for sliding in cards, bookmarks, or other things like that--the mini zines were too wide to fit. There's also 4 different patterns in this shot, but they're all medieval/Renaissance-ish themed, as is the entire journal, and neither of those eras was particularly known for its tasteful restraint.

A representative example of the signature containing the Major Arcana. Each spread has the card in a frame of sorts on the left and a random page decorated in a pseudo-medieval/Renaissance way on the right. All these papers were bought off of Etsy.

A blurry example of the Minor Arcana. Each suit gets its own signature, and the frame surrounding the card is the same for all cards of that suit, while the right-hand journaling/notes page is randomly picked from my collection of 25-ish decorative papers.

Each signature also has two blank pages at the end, because signatures have to be divided by 4 since I'm making them by folding an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper in half (and then trimming the edges).

I thought the book was too small, so I put two blank signatures at the back, for whatever use.

The cats, wondering what I'm up to.

And the back interior cover, with another tuck spot and three more zines I found online. You can also see the twine I glued under the endpaper for closing the book with the circle-dooleybopper on the front cover, like it's interoffice mail.

* Too often they're crammed full of manufactured ephemera, with no space to make it yours, really. And I have seen too many lovely collage/3D assemblage designs ruined by placing an unnecessary word on it.**

** Neither me nor

myrialux are into using words like "Inspire!" "~dream~" and whatnot in design. It's one thing if you're putting together an album of travel photos and are using words to, say, caption photos or label sections, but to create an assemblage of travel-related ephemera and then smack the word "travel" on it in a vintage font is just unnecessary.*** My apologies if you're that sort of person, but it's just not me.

*** I am aware the pillow in the background of many of the pics has words on it. In this case they're too small to read, so the script becomes a design element, instead of a statement, which I'm fine with.