If you've ever made or bought a beautiful handmade journal and then wondered what on earth to actually put inside it — this video is for you. I flip through my completed personal junk journal page by page, showing you how it grew from a blank cereal-box book into something full of memories, found scraps, handwritten notes, and small moments I wanted to hold onto. It's my honest answer to the question I get asked most often: what do you actually do in a junk journal?
What we cover
This is a flip-through of one completed personal junk journal — not a project tutorial, but a tour of a real, fully-filled book. Along the way I talk through what's on each spread, why it's there, and how it all comes together: collaged magazine images, notes from friends, fabric scraps cut from my kids' outgrown clothing, tea-dyed paper, playing cards, hand-stitched pages, currently lists, pockets, tags, booklets, and more. The construction tutorial for this journal lives in a separate video (linked below); this one is purely about the filling.
What you'll learn
What a finished, well-used junk journal actually looks like — not a pristine showpiece, but a full, slightly chaotic, deeply personal book that's been written in, glued into, and tucked with found things over months.
How to use a junk journal for memory keeping — not just as a craft project. Throughout the flip-through you'll see how small, ordinary things become meaningful when they go into a book: a note from a neighbor, a little flower my son made me, pencil shavings with a drawn face from a teacher, a fragment of my daughter's outgrown shoe. None of it is precious on its own. Together, it's a record of a time I'll be genuinely glad to have.
How "currently lists" work as a journaling format, including:
- What I'm watching, reading, learning, loving, and hating — captured in a single spread
- Dating entries so that looking back (in 5, 10, 20 years) you remember exactly where you were and what you were thinking about
- Using them as a low-effort entry point on days when you don't feel like making anything elaborate
How to handle pages where you're not feeling crafty — some of the spreads in this journal are just things glued down. A magazine cutout. A quote. A photo. That's it. Not every page has stitching or watercoloring or paper flowers, and that's completely intentional. A junk journal is a place to show up, not to perform.
How to use found and sentimental ephemera as raw material, including:
- Junk mail envelopes and catalog pages as background material
- Cards, letters, and notes from people you love (kept whole, or used as pages)
- Fabric scraps from outgrown or worn-out clothing
- Receipts, order notes, stickers — anything with a memory attached
- A child's artwork or small gift
How to set an intention at the front of a journal — I tucked a short handwritten note right at the beginning as a reminder to myself of why I journal and what I want the book to be. When you open a blank journal and feel lost, having that there helps.
How pockets, envelopes, tags, and booklets add layers to a spread, including:
- Belly bands with an envelope tucked inside
- A small hand-stitched booklet with dated entries — things like "first hug in two months" during lockdown
- Tags that hold a quote, a thought, or just a decoration
- Pockets that hold things you're not ready to display but want to keep
How a junk journal can hold a year — this journal was made and filled over several months in 2020. Flipping back through it now, each page triggers a specific memory: the kindergarten reunion just before lockdown, a crafty afternoon with my kids, a COVID-era note from a neighbor left in letterboxes up and down our street. The book does the remembering so I don't have to rely on my own memory alone.
Tips & gotchas
Always date your entries. Even just the month and year. When I flip back to a currently list from September 2020 I can place myself exactly — what I was making, what I was worried about, what I was watching. In ten or twenty years that context will matter far more than the collage on the same page. It takes two seconds and it's the single most useful habit I've built into my journaling practice.
Your junk journal can be anything. I get asked constantly what a junk journal is for — and the honest answer is that there's no correct answer. Recipe book. Gardening notes. Lyrics. Poems. Pure glue book. Memory keeper. A place to collect quotes that speak to you. The one in this video is a personal journal, but the form is just a container. You decide what goes in it.
Not every page needs to be elaborate. Some of the pages I show in this flip-through are literally just one magazine image glued down and left. No journaling, no embellishment, nothing. That's a valid page. The pressure to make every spread beautiful is the thing most likely to keep you from using your journal at all. A glued image on a Tuesday because you wanted to sit quietly with your book for ten minutes — that counts.
Sentimental scraps are worth keeping, even if they seem small. A little felt flower from a worn-out shoe. Pencil shavings in a paper. A doily a toddler handed me with enormous pride. These feel trivial in the moment and become irreplaceable five years later. If something made you pause — a note, a card, a small gift, something that triggered a feeling — it probably belongs in your journal.
You don't have to write on every page you collage. Several spreads in this journal have images and no writing. I left them that way on purpose. Sometimes the image says what needs to be said, and writing over it would take something away rather than add to it.
A junk journal is one of the most forgiving creative formats I know, and a completed one is a record of your life that you genuinely cannot recreate later. The construction tutorial for this journal is linked in the description if you want to make one of your own.
