A POCKET OF POCKETS

Continuing to build my stash of album elements and embellishments.

This morning I watched a YouTube video where different ideas for junk journals were being explored, and among them was a floating pocket with subsidiary pockets front and back. It was quite attractive, and was folded from a single sheet of paper. She credited the template with Margareth of Sevenplaza YouTube channel. I jotted down the template. It was designed for American letter-sized paper (8 1/2 x 11 inches) which is shorter and wider than A4. I did a quick mock-up with a scrap of A5 paper before making it up with one of my recently-created mixed media papers.

In the end, I didn’t measure anything. The left-hand vertical fold is slightly smaller than the right-hand one, which makes the diagonal folds overlap nicely. I did a bit of trial and error before I got it right but you really don’t need measurements. There’s a cut horizontally on the bottom left, and vertically bottom right. Folding these pieces front and back creates pockets on both sides of the entire element.

Here is what I call my “pocket of pockets” created from the mixed media paper. The cross-over parts make two pockets, and the folded up part at the bottom makes a third one.

Folding it with the wrong side of the paper uppermost meant that nearly all the wrong side is covered up. As the paper was a bit flimsy, I reinforced various parts of the element with scraps of card hidden behind, and added some more papers for a bit of contrast on the smaller subsidiary pockets. Inking all the edges, and cutting thumb notches (using my envelope punch board – you can actually get a small punch which makes this notch but the envelope board does just as good a job), made all the elements stand out nicely.

This is the back.

There is a big pocket across the bottom, with a smaller one on top of it, to the right. I didn’t want to add any different paper to this as I really liked the original but I slotted in some inked book paper to the smaller area on the left.

To show how the pockets work, I tucked some pieces of scrap card into them. Front:

…and back:

You could simply glue this element down onto a page, but then you would lose the benefit of the pockets on the back, and also the pretty paper!

To show how you might attach the floating “pocket of pockets” onto a page, here’s a demonstration with the two hidden paperclips I made – first, attaching the pocket to the top of a page:

…and secondly, at the side:

Since the pocket will eventually hold various tags, I think a side attachment would probably be most practical. A simple clip like a wire bulldog clip would probably suffice, or a decorative wire paperclip – you can get these in all sorts of shapes these days, to suit the style or theme of your journal. My two hidden paperclips are not ideal for this but I just wanted to show some possibilities.

Here are all the elements I have made so far.

I am not planning to add too much in the way of embellishments to most of them from now on, as I make them, but to keep them more generic. I can embellish them easily and quickly when I pull them out to use on different projects. Adding embellishments and focal points at this stage might limit my options later on.

I didn’t do very much in the studio today because somehow time ran away with me after a busy domestic morning, and also trying to find a parcel which I was told had been delivered. Too often the driver leaves the parcel on the doorstep and drives off. I never heard the bell, and there was no parcel on the step or in the outhouse. Eventually I went up to the top of the garden and found it outside the back gate!! First time they’ve ever delivered there… All this messing about certainly takes time out of 0ne’s creative day!

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