For some reason, everywhere I look, I see junk journals. Waifish, skipping women with 1960s pigtails and thick, velvet alice bands are doing this chunky, eclectic sort of journalling in droves, or so Instagram informs me.
There is an endless stream of them, filled with stickers and torn paper and receipts for coffees. And glorious reams of washi tape, of course.
Many such cases.
And I have to admit, I love it. I've been, mostly, a person who uses a single medium at a time. One solitary pencil, for several pages. I'm a bit like an ascetic monk that way. They, too, fill their journals with pencil drawings only, no doubt. But mixed media is delicious, and I have made many a collage over the years.
It's only natural, surely, to stuff as many things in your journal as possible. So why have I never really done this? Well, I have - I made my own chunky book from printer paper during my university days and stuck all manner of torn scraps in there. And that was pretty great! I also distinctly remember a brown paper journal that I would stick loads of stuff into before I wrote a diary entry in there every day. So I guess I forgot about this frenetic way of doing things. But now I'm in the zone. I have a glue stick. I'm ready.
One Christmas ago, in 2024, before she died, my grandma gave me a stack of notebooks. I think it was four in total. One is specifically for keeping notes about books in, but the others are normal lined notebooks. The smallest one is a spiral-bound, roughly A6-sized notebook, and I have now dedicated it to the junk world. That thing is getting junked.
I started it this Christmas just gone, and I love the feeling of slapping down miscellaneous things. I kept the tag from my cousin's new shoes (not pictured), and if you look carefully, you might notice that there are two Christmas cracker hats slammed in there.
Did I receive a selection of washi tapes for Christmas? Which I picked out in The Works myself when I was supposed to be Christmas shopping for other people? Yes. Yes I did. And I shall be making excellent use of them.
Girl, yes! I've always loved the idea of mixing scrapbooking and journaling, so before the "junk journal" term was coined, I was calling my bits everything journals. Simply because I did a little of everything in them lol.It's always nice seeing a new notebook get that happy weight over time 😝 I adore your little animal doodles!!
ReplyDelete"Everything journals" sounds pretty cute, love it :-)
DeleteLove all of these! I got started doing some mixed media art/collages a few years ago, but I always got overwhelmed trying to put my ideas down. But the junk journaling trend actually helped me feel a little more free in sticking stuff together. It helps that I've saved lots of scraps over the years to do something with it.
ReplyDeleteAww that's nice, yeah there's something wild and free about this style of journalling!!
DeleteInstagram simultaneously inspires me to do amazing, creative things while also making me feel like the most unimaginative, boring little worm on the planet.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, junk journaling! It looks super cute, I've always wanted to do it but I think I'm worried I'd abandon it and it'd just be some weird thing sitting on the corner of my desk that I don't want anyone to see. I feel like I've also seen some amazing artistic ones and I feel like I've kind of lost touch with my artistic side a bit as I've grown older.