Junk Journaling: A Complete Guide

My first junk journal lives in a battered hardback notebook I picked up for £4 at a charity shop in Oxford. It has a coffee ring on the front cover that I tried for about ten seconds to clean off before deciding it belonged there. The first page is a metro ticket from a city I will not see again, taped down crooked, with three sentences underneath about why I was on that train.

That is junk journaling: a notebook where the actual scraps of your life — receipts, ticket stubs, pressed flowers, magazine corners, envelopes, fabric, washi tape, paint, photographs, anything you would otherwise throw away — get glued, taped, or stitched in alongside whatever you want to write about them. It is part scrapbook, part journal, part collage, part archaeology of an ordinary life.

It is also, accidentally, one of the most forgiving forms of journaling a person can start.

What junk journaling actually is

There is no single, agreed-upon definition. Junk journaling sits in a space between scrapbooking, art journaling, and traditional written journaling, and different practitioners emphasize different elements.

What most junk journals share:

• Found and recycled materials. Receipts, tickets, packaging, old book pages, sheet music, envelopes, magazine clippings, fabric, ribbon, dried plants. The "junk" in junk journaling refers to objects that would otherwise be thrown away.
• Mixed media. A typical spread combines paper ephemera with handwritten text, sometimes paint, ink, washi tape, stamps, or stitching.
• No requirement for artistic skill. Unlike art journaling, where some practitioners do produce gallery-quality work, junk journaling is deliberately rough. The aesthetic is "loved and lived in," not polished.
• A focus on memory and noticing. The reason you keep the ferry stub is that it meant something. The act of taping it in and writing about it makes you think about why.

What junk journaling is not:

• It is not scrapbooking. Scrapbooks are usually thematic, often event-based (a wedding, a holiday, a baby's first year), and frequently designed with viewing by others in mind. Junk journals are diary-shaped — personal, mixed, often unreadable to anyone but you.
• It is not bullet journaling. Bullet journals are productivity systems. Junk journals are reflective and aesthetic.
• It is not collage art for its own sake. The materials matter because of what they meant in your life, not because they're visually striking.

Why it works

Junk journaling lowers the bar to a daily writing practice in a way pure prose journaling can't.

If you sit down in front of a blank notebook page with the brief "write something honest about today," many people freeze. There is no natural starting point. The page is too open. The expectation is too verbal.

If you sit down with the same notebook and a ticket stub from the morning train, you have a physical anchor. You can put the ticket on the page, write three lines about the conversation you overheard on the platform, and you've done a valuable journaling session. The artifact carried half the cognitive load.

This is why junk journaling works particularly well for:

• People who feel "not creative enough" for art journaling but want some visual element in their practice
• Memory keepers — people who want to remember the texture of their actual days, not just the dramatic events
• Anyone trying to build a journaling habit and failing because the blank page is too intimidating
• Travelers, who naturally accumulate ephemera worth keeping
• Anyone going through a major life transition — junk journals from a year you moved house, changed jobs, lost someone, or fell in love tend to be the ones you treasure most later

What you actually need

You can start a junk journal today with what's in your house.

The basics, in order of importance:

1. A notebook with reasonably thick pages. Glue and tape will warp thin paper. A blank-page A5 hardback works well. Old hardback books with the pages painted over are popular in the junk journaling community, but a £5 notebook is fine.
2. A glue stick. A liquid glue or PVA also works but tends to warp pages more. The glue stick is the workhorse.
3. Scissors. Any scissors.
4. A pen you like writing with. Whatever you'd happily write three pages with.

Useful but optional:

5. Washi tape. Decorative paper tape that's repositionable while it's fresh. Mostly used to frame edges of ephemera, but also good for adding colour to a page.
6. A box for collecting materials. A shoebox, a desk drawer, an envelope. The discipline of keeping ephemera throughout the day matters more than the storage container itself.
7. Old magazines, books, or sheet music as collage source material.
8. Watercolours or coloured pencils if you want to paint backgrounds.
9. A small ruler for tearing paper in straight lines.

What you don't need: an expensive crafting kit, a specific brand of journal, washi tape in every colour of the rainbow, or any of the "junk journal starter packs" sold on Etsy. The whole point is the materials are free.

How to start (this weekend)

Day one: collect.

Spend a single day actively noticing what you'd normally throw away. The bus ticket, the bakery receipt, the parking stub, the wrapper from the chocolate, the napkin with a stranger's recommended bookshop scribbled on it. Don't try to be tasteful. Just keep things. Use a pocket or an envelope as your collection point.

Day two: paste.

Sit down with your notebook, glue stick, scissors, and the collected materials. Don't plan the page. Pick up a piece, find a spot for it, glue it down, and write a sentence or two about it underneath or beside it. Don't try to fill the page. A junk journal page with three taped items and twenty words is just as valid as one packed edge to edge.

Day three onwards: notice.

The shift that makes junk journaling stick is when you start noticing materials throughout your day with the notebook in mind. The leaflet you'd usually toss becomes interesting because you can see where it might live on a page. This is the real practice — not the gluing, but the noticing.

Common themes and approaches

Junk journals tend to organize themselves around themes that emerge naturally from what you're collecting. A few that show up often:

Memory keeping. The dominant use case. Day-to-day life with the supporting evidence taped in alongside.

Travel. Maps, tickets, beer labels, currency, postcards, restaurant napkins, photos. Travel junk journals are the gateway drug — many people start with one and continue into daily practice afterward.

Gratitude with artifacts. Instead of writing "I am grateful for the coffee shop down the street," you tape in the receipt and write underneath: "still grateful for this place, eleven months in."

Seasonal observation. A page per week or per fortnight, focused on what is currently in season — pressed leaves, ticket stubs from the autumn fair, a wrapper from the first hot drink of October.

Reading journals. Bookmark scraps, used train tickets that were doubling as page markers, quotes copied out by hand, the receipt from the bookshop. Surprisingly satisfying.

Grief and remembrance. Junk journals from a year someone died — full of the small physical evidence of their continued presence in your daily life — tend to be the journals people return to most.

Common mistakes

Treating it as scrapbooking and trying to make it look good. The minute you start planning pages for visual impact, the practice changes its character. Junk journaling pages should feel like evidence, not display.

Hoarding materials without ever sitting down to paste. A box full of receipts is not a junk journal. The pages matter; the collection is just the supply chain.

Buying expensive supplies before establishing the habit. Start with a glue stick and a notebook. If you fall in love with the practice over three months, then upgrade.

Trying to do it daily. Most people who keep junk journals long-term work on them once or twice a week, batching a few days' worth of accumulated materials in a single session. Daily is a recipe for burnout.

Worrying about archival quality. Yes, glued receipts will yellow. Yes, tape can fail in twenty years. No, this is fine. Junk journals are not heirlooms. The point is the act, not the preservation.

A note on spelling

You'll see "junk journaling" and "junk journalling" used interchangeably. The double-l version is the British spelling convention (we double consonants after a single vowel before adding -ing — the same rule that gives "travelled" and "modelled"). The single-l version is the American convention. The practice is identical.

When junk journaling works best

If you've tried straight written journaling and bounced off it because the blank page felt too demanding, junk journaling is one of the most reliable ways back into the practice. The physical anchor of an actual object lowers the activation energy enough that the writing happens almost as a byproduct.

It's also one of the only journaling formats that works well for people who don't naturally process emotions through words. A page that's mostly pasted ephemera with a single line of text underneath is, for some people, a more honest record of a day than three pages of prose ever would be.

Start with your tickets, your receipts, your scraps. Glue them in. Write a few sentences. See what you notice.

For related practices, see our guides to art journaling (closer to making actual art) and travel journaling (the same instincts applied to trips specifically). For a less material practice, reflective journaling covers the structured-reflection end of the spectrum.