TL;DR version: a junk journal is like a traditional scrapbook, but works more like a notebook than a more formal album. You create one using pretty much anything you have lying around at home – newspaper clippings, fabric swatches, magazine cutouts, ticket stubs, receipts etc – as well as “proper” stationery or scrapbooking elements like stickers or deco paper. Each page can be whatever you want; a dream diary, a piece of miniature art, a one-line diary type entry, or just bits and pieces arranged in some way that feels meaningful to you.
If you’re looking for a way to be creative and expressive but struggle with more “raw” forms of standalone art like writing, drawing, or painting, a junk journal can be a great way to combo all these things up, avoiding the weaknesses you might have in each one while leaning into the strengths. It’s fun, low effort, inexpensive, and super easy to get into with minimal effort and initial investment – heck, you can probably get started for close to free with things already in your home.
I got into junk journaling myself as a low-effort form of keeping my creative brain active when experiencing writer’s block meant I couldn’t get anything written (which is my primary form of recreational creativity). In fact I started by watching a few ASMR-type journaling videos over on YouTube but found myself getting enjoyable brain tingles from more than just the delicious papery sounds! For a taste of what got me interested in the hobby, have a watch and listen (ideally with headphones in) to this short 4 minute vid from one of my favourite YouTubers, Hanabi:
The pretty paper! The colours! The theming! The aesthetic of the whole thing! I won’t say I fell in love instantly, but after watching quite a lot of this vids over several months I realised I wanted to try it myself as well as watching and listening to all those lovely papery crinkles on videos. Since all you really need to get going is a notepad of some sort, some glue, some scissors, and any old bits of paper/card/fabric you have lying around, it’s not exactly a hobby with a high cost of entry, and since my husband collects Warhammer models… I find that pretty appealing. 😂
Junk journals are also a handy way to get into visual artistic self-expression if you lack the skills (or time/patience to develop said skills) for things like drawing or painting. I can barely produce a passable stick figure on a good day so any kind of visual art has been a closed book (er, empty sketchbook?) for me for years, but since discovering junk journaling I’ve loved being able to create my own type of “art” without needing to worry about what it specifically looks like. You could certainly combo up parts of a junk journal to make a proper art journal if you wanted to, but above all junk journaling offers an easy way to get creative with thoughts, ideas, memories and emotions. I use one of mine (yes, I have several on the go at once!) as a general “things I find pretty” collation along with a kind of scrapbook-ish diary. I keep postcards and things I like in it. I scribble or scrawl or otherwise vent emotionally in it, which is an amazing form of self-therapy and reflection for me because I struggle to keep a conventional written diary.
Keeping a junk journal can mean a lot of different things to different people (which of course is one of the beauties of it) but for me it is a way to be a little bit arty and creative without needing to have my brain on Intense Operating Mode. It isn’t about reliving and organising memories of the past like conventional scrapbooking – although I do make “memory pages” sometimes – so much as just letting go of worries and anxieties to take some self-care time that’s creative but doesn’t require, or even aspire towards, any kind of perfection.
So what a junk journal is can boil down to “a scrapbook-type thing you fill up with any old stuff you want” in a very small nutshell! But what a junk journal means, and what it could mean for each individual keeping one (or more), is entirely unique… just like each journal will be!
