What’s the Purpose of a Junk Journal?
A junk journal is a type of journal or scrapbook that allows creative self-expression using found and curated materials. Crafters can collect scraps of paper from daily life, printables from the internet, and other materials that catch their eye – then recycle them into beautiful and sentimental works of art.
While scrapbooking has been a popular craft for a long time, junk journals take the creative process a step further by embracing imperfection and disregarding the usual conventions.
Junk journaling allows self-expression through bringing together materials you might not have thought would go well together. Rather than following strict rules or guidelines, they celebrate spontaneous creativity.
A Creative Outlet
Junk journals provide the perfect outlet for creativity. They’re especially great for people who don’t like to start from a blank page. Instead, you can gather materials first and then rearrange them to see how they fit together.
Eclectic pages then become a canvas for collage, doodling, embedding objects, and other decorative embellishments.
With no strict rules, junk journals let you playfully discover color and texture combinations you didn’t expect. Their pages become canvases to freely experiment with collage, drawing, memorabilia, and mixed media.
Layouts can be designed intuitively according to personal theme, month, or mood rather than a rigid chronology – like a bullet journal might be.
Stress Relief
Getting lost in the process of cutting, pasting, drawing and experimentation calms the mind and relieves anxiety.
The process of cutting, pasting and embellishing provides relaxation similar to meditation or yoga. Getting lost in the joy of repurposing feeds both sides of the brain. Left-brained task lists and right-brained doodles dance together.
There are no rights or wrongs, so junk journaling fosters a relaxed environment to freely explore ideas and have fun. The creative process releases feel-good endorphins that counteract stress hormones.
Memory Keeping
Junk journals can be used to document your life and for memory keeping.
Photos, drawings, tea packets, ticket stubs, greeting cards – any kind of ephemera can find a loving home between the pages. While these items may seem mundane to us right now, years from now when design trends have changed, they will be a fascinating relic of the past.
If you’ve always felt that urge to keep ephemera from your life but aren’t sure what to do with it, a junk journal is a great place to start. Over time, the pages of your junk journals become rich visual autobiographies.
In a strange way, flipping through old junk journals can transport you back in time, like a memory anchor. They can even transport you back in time to when you collected and curated the items.
Art Journaling
A junk journal is a great place to test out your art supplies and go wild making mixed media pieces. It’s like an “anything goes” type of journal, so each page can be different from the last. You’re never restricted to any one style, and you don’t even need to “finish” your drawings.
One page might be a paper collage. The next might be a collection of tags from every tea you drank this month. While the next page can be covered in pretty acrylic paints, and the next can house your colored pencil swatches.
One of my favorite things about a junk journal is that you never have to start from a blank page. By including lots of printable pages, pages you found in old books or magazines, decorative papers and more, every page you turn to already has something on it just waiting for your additions.
You never have to stare at a scary white page wondering what to do next.
Self Exploration
Over time, patterns may emerge that provide a richer understanding of yourself.
Through pasting in the things that catch your eye, your junk journal becomes a visual timeline of your growth, evolution, interests and what truly sparks joy or inspiration for you.
Unstructured collages can uncover unconscious symbols and metaphors with personal meaning. Documenting your moods, memories and streams of consciousness offers valuable self-reflection.
Even spontaneous doodles or fragments of poetry may hold clues about inner worlds. Revisiting junk journal pages helps recognize recurring themes and track personal growth or changes in perspective over time.
Upcycling
Junk journals champion reuse and repurposing. Scraps of paper, ribbons, buttons, gift wrap – one person’s “trash” transforms into treasure through creative repurposing.
Coffee stained papers, remnants of wrapping paper, aging ticket stubs, and scraps find new life when repurposed into whimsical page layouts. Rather than throwing away items, junk journaling encourages appreciating the simple beauty in the scraps found around us.
Junk journals are an eco-friendly and sustainable art form that lets you create using the things you already have around you!
A Beautiful Keepsake
Junk journals take on more meaning and value as they accumulate pages over months or years. The handmade quality and blending of personal ephemera makes each one unique.
As journals are passed down generations, they come to feel like portals into another place and time. Grandchildren glimpse their ancestors’ daydreams, hobbies and challenges.
Handwriting evolves while fashions and landscapes change around preserved mementos. The curated format provides a context that raw documents alone never could.
Start Your Junk Journal Today!
Junk journals are expressive scrapbooks that promote stress relief, memory keeping, inspiration and upcycling through unstructured, creative play with mixed materials.
Their chaotic yet cohesive pages become a treasure to flip through later and savor the crinkly, visually rich pages.
I hope this blog post gave you plenty of inspiration in your journaling journey!
