You may have noticed the various creative influencers of Instagram and Pinterest recently hopping onto the trend of junk journalling. The premise combines collage and diary-keeping, transforming collected items into art projects that immortalise your favourite memories. Whether it is an event, day trip, museum visit, society, or entire semester you want to remember, keeping a junk journal is the ideal way to capture the best moments of your student life and beyond. All you need is a pad of paper and some glue.
The first step is simple: don’t throw away any items that can be stuck onto a page. For example, if you take a day trip to York hold on to your train tickets, Jorvik museum leaflet, business cards from shops on the Shambles, branded napkins from cafés or restaurants, and bottle labels from pubs. Other tokens could include postcards from gift shops or your own photos if you print them out.
Even without a specific event lined up, your daily uni life would provide plenty of collectable items. Loyalty cards, Bee Network bus tickets, daily to-do lists, and (clean-ish) food wrappers from Atlantic Fish Bar or Insomnia Cookies could all come together as a page summarising your Manchester student experience. You may want to keep a small plastic wallet or box in your bag for storing souvenirs so they don’t get lost or damaged.
The next step is to spread all your collected bits and bobs out on a table and get arranging creatively. Design what is essentially a personalised puzzle made of up your memorabilia. Open up your journal and stick items down, add doodles, stickers, small diary entries and anything else you like. You may want to create a title from cut-out letters, or label items so that future you remembers what they mean. Incorporate a colour theme, turn postcards into flaps so you can decorate the backs of them, fashion paper pockets for bulkier times, or scrawl poignant song lyrics across the page.
The goal is to create a keepsake that reflects what is important to you so there is zero pressure to make it look any way other than how you want. Enjoy the freedom of the process and the result will be a nostalgic reminder of your time at university and beyond.
Junk journalling is ideal for a student budget because it is practically free; all your materials are either by-products of already-made purchases, or cheap additions such as postcards and stickers. This also makes it a largely sustainable hobby, and if you are concerned about your lack of art supplies you can expand your inventory sustainably too.
Charity shops in Withington, East Didsbury and beyond are full of magazines and books with pictures and words you can cut out. It is worth having a look for other art supplies too, such as tissue paper and pens. Freecycle and Vinted also offer materials from time to time. If you have no luck second hand, shops such as Flying Tiger offer pads, glue, washi tape and more at prices friendly to a student budget.
Getting into junk journaling might inspire you to get into a collaging habit, especially if you build up a selection of picture books and postcards to draw from. Pick and choose a handful of images and see what you can do with them, perhaps guiding yourself with a theme such as ‘blue and red’ or ‘the ocean’. You could make pages out of items you collect throughout the year. Keep items with bees on them found around Manchester and create a buzzing collage from them, or save every teabag tag or fruit sticker and turn them into a piece of art. The opportunities are endless!
It is refreshing to capture memories without the use of a phone or camera, taking the time to craft a personalised souvenir by hand which makes the finished product all the more sentimental. If you aren’t sure where to start, a quick search of ‘junk journal’ on Instagram or Pinterest is bound to inspire you. A cosy artistic hobby is perfect for filling the evenings during the chilly winter months. Before you know it, your junk journal will be popping open to display its colourful interior of memorabilia.
