Growing up, my kitchen table was my creative studio. Drawing, felting, and crafting jewelry were my constant companions. I even took on ambitious projects like painting the walls of my wooden dollhouse. Creativity was simply a part of my everyday life.
However, as I got older, the pressure to pursue “more serious” activities began to creep in. Gradually, my youthful hobbies took a backseat to academic pursuits like writing and playing the cello. While these new endeavors were fulfilling in their own right, a part of me missed the carefree joy of making things with my hands.
The perfectionist within me struggled to justify creating art purely for enjoyment. The thought process was often, “If it’s not going to be objectively ‘good,’ what’s the point?” This mindset stifled my desire to simply experiment and play.
Fast forward to my senior year of college. A publishing class presented a final project: creating a collection of literary work and designing a cover for it. I found myself wrestling with digital design programs, the semester rapidly drawing to a close. Frustration mounted. Then, one day after class, a small trinket box, long unpacked, offered an unexpected solution. Pouring its contents – foreign coins, a magnet, a fortune cookie fortune – onto my desk, which happened to be covered with a Minnesota Orchestra brochure, sparked an idea.
I began to rearrange the trinkets on the brochure, intrigued by the three-dimensional effect they created against the printed background. Flipping through the brochure, I noticed interesting illustrations and fonts. Suddenly, I was transported back to elementary school art class, constructing collages on large poster boards. Those early projects often felt daunting because of the vast blank space. But using the magazine cover as a base, I had a framework, a starting point.
Gathering more objects from my dorm room and common areas, I taped them onto the brochure and scanned the finished collage with my phone. This simple act of creating a found-object collage was a gentle nudge back towards the creative kid I had once been.
Junk Journaling: Where Collaging Meets Memory Keeping
After graduation, my mom gifted my long-distance boyfriend and me identical notebooks. The thought of filling them with collages immediately came to mind. Shortly after, an Instagram video featuring a couple exchanging journals, filling them with love notes, photos, and mementos, solidified the idea.
I suggested to my boyfriend that we could use our notebooks in a similar way, with no restrictions on content. Our entries quickly evolved into collaborative junk journals: collections of receipts, tags, notes, programs, stamps, stickers, ribbons, and doodles – essentially, a tangible record of our shared experiences, both big and small.
Junk journaling offers a more relaxed and accessible approach to scrapbooking. It embraces imperfection and utilizes readily available, often free, materials. One day might involve cutting out letters from a library bookmark to spell my boyfriend’s name, the next, pressing a fallen leaf gathered during a walk by Lake Bemidji – moments captured and preserved.
Unlike traditional scrapbooking focused on linear storytelling, junk journaling is more about capturing a feeling, an atmosphere, through found objects and ephemera. Double-sided tape allows for layering and rearranging items, creating dynamic and evolving pages. We often revisit pages, adding new elements or notes, creating a shared space for communication across the miles.
This approach to journaling has been instrumental in challenging my perfectionistic tendencies. The inherent messiness and found-object nature of junk journaling removes the pressure to create something flawless. It’s about the process and the memories, not a pristine outcome.
Creating a junk journal has also proven to be incredibly grounding. In unfamiliar places, I find myself searching for unique items to incorporate. Saving interesting pieces of cardboard or plastic packaging to repurpose into art helps reduce waste and transforms everyday items into meaningful components of our story.
What was once considered trash has become a cherished part of our lives, tangible pieces of our shared narrative and a testament to our relationship. Junk journaling, as perhaps readers of Bemidji Pioneer News might also discover, is a surprisingly rewarding way to reconnect with creativity and find beauty in the everyday.
