Just a Little Bit of Glue: The Art of Junk Journaling

Written & Creative Directed by Koli Croy

Photography by Mindy Welland

Modeled by Kaitlyn Patton

Photos, scrap paper, old receipts, pressed coins, plane tickets — hell, maybe even some old notes your best friend wrote you in eighth grade. These are the components for a great junk scrapbook page. 

Now I can’t speak for everyone, but as a college senior nearing graduation, I have turned into such a sentimental person! These last couple weeks I have found myself saving anything and everything. I mean, I went to Whataburger with some friends the other night and I found myself keeping the receipt that said “#6 Whatameal with no onions or tomatoes,” just because I knew I could find a purpose for it. 

Now whenever I go out, I try to save something from each night that will evoke a certain  memory. Maybe this is me realizing that keeping all these bits and bobs pressed flat in my “Game of Thrones” book on my nightstand isn’t doing them any good. 

I knew it was time to take matters into my own hands and start scrapbooking.

This isn’t your grandma's scrapbook, but rather a junk scrapbook. It’s messy, chaotic, and has a lot going on at the moment! But it’s somewhere that I am able to showcase my college nights and remember the good times. 

Your pages can be full of anything; I tend to print out a bunch of photos so they can be littered throughout the pages. Cutting them into fun shapes and sizes helps me figure out what I want the focus for the page to be. Will it be the note my grandpa left on the kitchen counter for me or a photo of my siblings? 

As you use these different textures, it also helps add more depth to your layout as well as providing a sensory aspect to the page. 

Looking through my own junk scrap book, it really got me wondering — why do we create these keepsakes of memories? While we create these pages, we are determining what is important to us. We hold onto these little memories that demonstrate what matters to us in the hopes that we can show them to the people that are important in our lives. It can be therapeutic for us to “relive” that day by decorating an 8.5 inch by 11 inch piece of paper. 

One of my pages is a boarding pass to Chicago and a ticket from the Chicago History Museum. Throughout, I placed photos of my brothers and I in our hometown before our summer ended.  When I look at that page now, I see my two younger brothers who were scared and anxious to leave for their first year of college, but also two boys that are growing up and finally going off to explore their passions. 

A junk journal is an amazing way to showcase messy, enjoyable, and nostalgia-filled nights. Even if you’re a college senior reading this, it’s never too late to start, and that just means you can fill it with anything your heart desires. You can put anything in these journals that will show you what you were doing, who you were with — even having little notes from your friends throughout the pages. I highly recommend you start one as well, sometimes the best nights are the ones you don’t remember, which is why I strongly recommend you start junk journaling.