Junk Journaling is more than a craft trend

WORDS Sara Radin

This feature is published as part of BRICKS #15 I Support You issue, with print spreads designed by Tatum Van Dam. You can order an issue now from our online store.

On a recent weekend in Philadelphia, the air outside felt like metal. Inside a room on Spring Garden Street, everything softened. A few dozen people leaned over tables scattered with glue sticks, scissors, and stacks of “junk” that didn’t look like junk for long: movie stubs, flyers, thrifted postcards, receipts soft from living in a wallet too long. Someone slid a sheet of stickers across the table like a secret. Another person tore a magazine page cleanly down the spine, the rip loud in the quiet, then smiled as if she’d just done something brave. 

Sydney, who has been hosting Let Me Know Club’s Junk Journal meetings for over a year, watched the room fill the way you watch a kitchen fill during a party: not with noise, exactly, but with warmth. The club began as “just a few of us” meeting in her apartment, she told me. Now, it has its own space on Spring Garden Street and regularly sells out around 35 tickets. Hundreds of people have come through, she said, including visitors from other towns and even other states. Many arrive already devoted to the craft, surprising Sydney because journaling had always felt solitary before she helped start Let Me Know Club. But others come for the first time, leaving with a hobby they didn’t know they needed. 

Junk journaling, at its most basic, is a low-barrier ritual: a notebook, some adhesive, and whatever paper life hands you. But the scene that has built around it, especially online, has begun to resemble something more essential, something closer to a mutual-aid network than a craft trend. Through mail swaps and community exchanges, women and femmes are turning the scraps of daily life into visual diaries that document grief, girlhood, anxiety, friendship, and the ongoing work of staying human in a screen-lit era. 

This is the soft paradox of junk journaling: the materials are disposable, but the act is devotional.

The practice is often described as imperfect by design, but that’s not just an aesthetic choice. It’s a refusal, and for many, it’s a kind of relief. 

“I have an OCD diagnosis,” Sydney said. “It’s affected my life in a lot of ways… I spend about 99 percent of my week trying to make everything perfect, both at work and at home.” When she found junk journaling, she said, it offered something she didn’t realise she was missing: permission to make a mess. “It feels so good to just… cut up random papers and glue it down inside of my notebook without any reason besides, it’s fun.” 

This is the soft paradox of junk journaling: the materials are disposable, but the act is devotional. The pages are built from things that were never meant to last, yet the result is often a record that feels sturdier than memory. A dinner menu becomes proof you were there. A photobooth strip becomes evidence of laughter. A ticket stub becomes a time-stamp on a life that moves too quickly to be fully held. 

For Cheyenne Livelsberger, junk journaling isn’t new. She started at 12, when her mom gave her a bright pink journal and told her it could be anything. “It can be writing, it can be drawing, it can literally be you taking your McDonald’s packaging and putting it in there,” Livelsberger remembered. She recently reread her first journal and found a mini-golf scorecard taped to a page. Beneath it: a sentence that made her laugh. “Yeah, so I lost.” 

That early permission, to make a record out of whatever you have, is at the heart of the movement’s appeal now. In a culture where creativity is often packaged as product and performance, junk journaling reclaims making as something that doesn’t have to be optimised. It doesn’t require talent, Sydney emphasised. You don’t need “artistic training” to create something “really fun and beautiful.” You just need to begin. 

It can be writing, it can be drawing, it can literally be you taking your McDonald’s packaging and putting it in there

Cheyenne Livelsberger

Livelsberger sees the practice as both personal and communal. Part of what drew her to scraps, receipts, and ephemera, she said, is that it’s affordable. “Certain supplies can be really expensive,” she told me. Found materials made it entry-level. But her attachment to the scraps is also rooted in tradition: her family saves brochures and tickets all year in a box, then opens it together right before New Year’s, talking through what happened and what mattered. “Instead of keeping it in a box,” she said, “I put mine in my journal.” 

The timing feels right for that reason, too. As New Year’s approaches, the algorithm starts pushing reinvention: new habits, new routines, new selves. Junk journaling offers something gentler, more plausible. Not a transformation, exactly, but a practice of noticing. That noticing becomes critical when life gets hard. 

Livelsberger described college as an identity quake. She went to a Big Ten school and felt out of place, “this little soft-hearted crafty girl” among people who seemed “one way.” After graduation, the overwhelm sharpened into panic attacks, an anxiety she’d known mentally but now felt physically, daily. Journaling, she said, became grounding. “Once it’s out of my system and on paper, I can feel that instant relief.” 

She also spoke about grief: losing her grandpa, her first close experience with death. “Grief is this ever-changing thing that’s always there,” she said. Writing allowed her to process privately, especially when other people didn’t share the same grief language. In her pages, loneliness becomes something that can be examined instead of obeyed. “I’m alone,” she wrote, but that doesn’t have to mean “I’m lonely.” 

This is where junk journaling begins to resemble support, not just self-expression. It is a place to put feelings when they don’t fit anywhere else. And when shared, it becomes a beacon for other people who are trying to survive the same weather. 

Tatum Van Dam, who lives in East London, describes herself as a “memory hoarder” or “emotional hoarder.” She saves the receipts from first dates, plane tickets, handwritten notes, even the little printout that comes with a tattoo. Each spread, she said, becomes a themed archive of a moment: a trip, a holiday, a birthday, a relationship milestone. The pages are arranged the way feelings are arranged, often by colour and texture rather than chronology. 

A spread made from a trip to Greece with her partner feels “relaxed and beachy,” she said, while a spread from Amsterdam is colder in palette, full of blues and black. “You can feel the emotions within them,” she told me. Her journals tend to be happy, but sentimentality is the through-line: “girlhood, empathy… friendship… connection.” 

In other words, the pages are a record of being held by other people, even in small ways. A note from a friend. A thank-you from an Etsy seller. The evidence of someone taking the time to leave a mark. 

Van Dam came to junk journaling through zines. In 2020, home and restless, she wanted to make one but felt intimidated by the idea that there were rules. Once she realised there weren’t, she scanned the ephemera she’d been stuffing under her bed and used Photoshop to create a digital zine, beginning with a breakup and the “processing” that followed. Eventually, she wanted to bring the archive back into her hands. “I still had so much stuff,” she said. Junk journaling became the physical counterpart to her digital practice. 

What she values most is tactility, especially because her job requires screens. “I’m a social media manager,” she said, “so much of my day is spent looking at a screen.” Journaling lets her “make a mess at my desk… listen to my music… and zone out and just create something.” 

It’s taught me to use my materials instead of saving them forever.

Tatum Van Dam

Even when she designs digitally, Van Dam tries to make it look analogue, like you could feel it “through your screen.” But nothing compares to holding a blank page and ending with something you didn’t plan. “It’s unexpected,” she said, and it comes from her own materials, not a Pinterest template. 

Imperfection is part of the lesson. Van Dam grew up saving stickers, afraid to use them because using them meant permanence. Even now, she’ll use double-sided tape in case she wants the sticker back later. Junk journaling forces a commitment: glue it down, and let it live there. “It’s taught me to use my materials instead of saving them forever,” she said. If she runs out, she can get more. The point is to stop treating beauty as something that must be preserved untouched. 

That philosophy is echoed, almost as a manifesto, by Martina Calvi, one of the creators whose work has helped propel junk journaling’s online renaissance. Note: her book on junk journaling – A Year of Junk Journaling: 52 Creative Prompts to Transform Scraps of Your Life Into Art – came out last year. For Calvi, the culture of the community is the story: “Junk journaling is not a craft to be gatekept,” she wrote. “There are no rules.” She has attended journaling events around the world, she said, and the energy is strikingly consistent: kind, warm, low-stakes. Many people arrive alone. Many are introverted. They come with “good intentions,” she said, and they come to connect. 

The scale of the resurgence matters less to her than its direction. “It feels like a small part of the culture is shifting back towards tenderness, meaning, slowness,” Martina wrote. “Craft is inherently hopeful. It says, ‘I have the time,’ ‘my time matters.’” In that formulation, journaling becomes not just a hobby but a declaration: time belongs to you, not the feed. 

Livelsberger described something similar when she talked about the slow physicality of the practice. “Adults don’t play enough,” she said. Junk journaling is play, yes, but it’s also a refusal. It’s doing something without making it content first. It’s making something that might never be posted, or might be posted only as a way to reach someone else. 

For the people who do share, what comes back is often a kind of recursive care. Livelsberger regularly hears from followers who started their first journal after seeing her videos. “It changed my life,” they tell her. Those comments matter not because they flatter, but because they prove the practice is contagious in the best way, passed hand to hand like a mixtape. 

And increasingly, it is passed literally. 

Mail swaps, travelling journals, and community exchanges are turning the movement into a physical network. Livelsberger co-runs a craft club in Chicago with her friend Kelly, where people share scraps and tapes across tables. The resulting pages, Livelsberger said, feel like “a combined effort” of everyone there. “That journal spread couldn’t come together without those people,” she told me. 

She’s also part of a travelling journal, a notebook mailed from person to person. Each contributor adds a page, then sends it along. Flipping through it, Livelsberger said, you see the sequence of hands that held it before you. The same base materials can yield wildly different spreads, each page a signature. The journal becomes proof that individuality doesn’t require isolation. 

In a moment when “community” is often treated like a brand identity, junk journaling communities are practising it as a verb: swapping, mailing, showing up, making space. The support is not theoretical. It’s adhesive. 

Livelsberger described the feeling of craft club as “a sleepover,” a nostalgia that is less about reenacting girlhood than reclaiming its safety. Watching a rom-com. Eating popcorn. Making something alongside someone else. In those spaces, she said, she feels feminine because it feels soft. Even when someone flips through her journal, and there are personal pages, people respect the boundaries. “It never feels harsh,” she said. “It just feels soft and so sweet.” 

That softness is not frivolous. It’s a mode of survival. 

Junk journaling is not a craft to be gatekept. There are no rules.

Martina Calvi

Kalli LeVasseur, who lives in Chicago and helps with a craft club newsletter, told me she came to junk journaling during a period of grief and pain, looking for a way to channel it somewhere positive. She stumbled onto Calvi’s posts and felt something click. Her mom had scrapbooked when she was growing up, but scrapbooking always seemed tethered to perfection. Junk journaling felt like the opposite: “free-flowing and having fun.” She put it on her vision board. Two years later, it’s routine. 

LeVasseur described it as “playtime,” a way to tune out and work with her hands after long days online. Like others, she didn’t consider herself a journaler. Words felt intimidating. Junk journaling offered a workaround: create without proving anything. It also offered something else: friendship. In her early thirties, she said, she struggled to find connection that wasn’t centred on drinking. Crafting gave her a different kind of gathering. “It’s honestly changed my life,” she said. 

What makes junk journaling feel like a movement now isn’t that everyone is doing it, but that the practice is becoming a shared language of care, one that doesn’t require performance. It’s not therapy. It’s not a cure. But for many, it is a place to put what can’t be carried alone. 

A receipt from a first date, saved because someone wanted to remember being wanted. A menu, saved because it was a night that felt like coming back to yourself. A sticker, finally used, because you decided your life is worth decorating in real time. 

In a culture that treats so much as disposable, junk journaling insists the opposite: nothing is too small to matter, and nothing needs to be perfect to be kept. The pages are imperfect on purpose because the people are, too. And what makes that beautiful is the way it travels, from one desk to another, from one city to another, from one person’s quiet evening into someone else’s comment section: I started because of you. I’m here because of you. I support you. 

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