The Beautiful Chaos of Junk Journalling

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.

A cropped journal page which shows a doodle of a cat pasted on top of a receipt.

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.

A screenshot of a TikTok video by piggichu, of a person assembling a double-page spread filled with miscellaneous scraps.A screenshot of an Instagram reel by chesmeetsworld, of a neatly arranged junk journal featuring tiny stamp-shaped cutouts of different scraps.

A screenshot of an Instagram reel by jasmini_the_genie of a journal spread shaped like an orange, on which she has collected various fruit stickers.Screenshot of an Instagram reel by catsplanner which shows a double-page spread of lots of different text scraps.

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.

A journal spread showing a few small drawings pasted on top of different receipts.

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.

Journal spread which shows a long, green drawing of a dog, and various scraps of shiny paper.

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.

A journal spread featuring a few random scraps, a drawing of a woman embracing a ghoul, and a tiny diary entry.

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.

A journal spread which has some polka dot and bright red scraps on one side, with a drawing of a bunny saying "I respect you so much", and on the other side, a drawing of a cat with the text "if you were here I would eat you like a succulent, ripe fruit".

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. 

1 comment:

  1. 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

Leave a comment here, like a pebble on a grave.