Craft Wren is a paper crafting blog for people who keep a drawer of pretty scraps and secretly want an excuse to use them. Junk journals, vision boards, printables, planner pages. The whole sticky, glue-on-your-fingers world of it.
Hi, I’m Elsie
This started with a shoebox. Ticket stubs, washi tape samples, torn magazine pages, a few dried flowers that had no business being saved. I’d been making junk journals since around 2014, and I kept noticing the same gap: most tutorials online skip the parts that actually trip people up. How do you start a page when the blank spread is staring back at you? Which supplies are worth the money and which are just clutter waiting to happen? Which glue stays put without warping the page six months later? Craft Wren is the place where I write the guides I wish I’d had when I began.
Why paper, still
Everything is a screen now, which is exactly why a journal you can hold feels good. There’s no notification on a glued-in ticket stub. You make it slowly, you flip through it later, and it’s yours in a way a saved folder never quite is.
What we cover
We stay close to paper, with a few detours.
- Junk journals. How to start one, which supplies actually matter, and ways to fill a page when you’re staring at a blank spread. Start with our beginner guide.
- Vision boards. Paper and digital, built to hold up past February.
- Printables and fonts. Free and paid finds we genuinely use, plus how to print and put them together at home.
- Planners and paper organization, for people who like a plan but bristle at a rigid one.
How we test before recommending
We try every supply we write about. Glue goes on actual junk journal pages and gets checked at one week, one month, and three months to see if it holds, warps the paper, or yellows around the edges. Printables get printed on three paper weights so we can tell you which one needs cardstock and which is fine on standard inkjet. Fonts get installed and used inside real spreads before they make a recommendation list. If something fails on the page, we say so, even if it’s a bestseller everywhere else. Our best glues guide is built on exactly that approach.
How we recommend things
A lot of what we link to lives on Creative Fabrica, a marketplace for fonts, printables, and craft files where members get a number of free downloads each month. Some of our links are affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission if you sign up or buy through them, at no extra cost to you. We run display ads too. None of it changes what we feature. We point you toward something because we tried it and it held up, not because of a commission. Our Affiliate Disclosure lays out the details.
Who writes this
Mostly Elsie, with a small circle of crafters who test ideas, break them, and tell us plainly when a tutorial doesn’t work. We write as “we” because crafting, at least the way it happens around here, is rarely a solo thing. Someone always has an opinion about your color choices, and that someone is usually right.
Say hello
Stuck on a spread? Hunting for a printable you can’t quite find? Email us at [email protected] or leave a note on our Contact page. We answer in batches once or twice a week, usually with too many supply tangents.