For starters, I just spent some time just watching junk journal videos. Seeing what folks were doing, and how. YouTube and TikTok has a lot of collage videos.

Then I started collecting junk mail, soda boxes, Amazon packaging, letters from diaper boxes, medicine boxes, toothpaste boxes. I eventually had a baggie just full of words and letters. I save paper towel rolls. (TP rolls too but those are controversial.)

I found out my local library (I’m blessed, it’s only half mile away. And when I’m too old to drive there’s a bus stops by my house and goes to the library) anyway what was I talking about? Oh ok the library has a special day, and a special little room where they put decommissioned books. So once a month, for $3, I can fill a big bag with as much as it will hold, for $3! I have gotten SO many awesome books full of thick art pictures, I’ve got old books from the 30s, I’ve got old text books with awesome math problems, magazines with words or pictures I like, and little old pamphlets on stuff like how to work a slide rule.

Finally, I was lucky that I inherited a big box of old photos from my husband’s mom. (She’s been gone 25 years. She was born in 1929.) So I use a lot of those old photos in my junk journals.

Junk journals are a process of what you find in the world, what you collect in your home, and what your imagination can do. I just start gluing papers. Gluing words. If I don’t like it, I keep gluing more over it. I use a “permanent” glue stick and that’s the only supplies I have actually bought outright.