The Art of Junk Journaling: Preserving Memories

I’ve been spending a lot of time junk journaling lately. The funny thing is, writing the journal isn’t what takes the most time. It’s deciding what belongs in it.

As I continue remodeling and reorganizing my house, every drawer seems to contain another little piece of my life. SCA event booklets. Class handouts. Site tokens. Business cards from merchants who may not even be in business now. Feast menus. Receipts. Notes scribbled during classes. Bits of ribbon and site tokens. Rings and favors from coronation oaths. Expired membership cards. The sort of things most people would toss without a second thought.

And that’s just the SCA stuff. As the youngest of three kids, I also have my mundane family legacy items to sort through. And some mementos from Denise’s childhood, too.

I hesitate, not because any one item is valuable. But because every one of them represents a memory.

This isn’t a new problem. Historians have wrestled with it for centuries.

Imagine a medieval monastery cleaning out its library. A monk has to decide which manuscripts deserve another expensive sheet of parchment and which will be scraped clean and reused. That decision determines what survives for us to read five hundred years later.

A Renaissance family decides an old letter isn’t important anymore. Gone.

A guild throws away its account books. Gone.

An ordinary woman keeps a recipe tucked inside a prayer book. Suddenly, centuries later, historians know what she cooked.

History isn’t only shaped by kings and queens. It’s shaped by what ordinary people decided was worth saving.

That realization has made me look at my own piles of treasures differently. As members of the SCA, we become accidental historians.

How many times have we wished someone had taken one more photograph of an early event? Written down a recipe? Saved a class handout? Recorded who made that beautiful piece of armor or embroidery? And who was it that taught that class anyway?

Sometimes today’s scrap of paper becomes tomorrow’s primary source.

On the other hand . . . if I save every piece of paper, I won’t have room to live.

That’s where junk journaling has become such a gift.

Instead of storing boxes of forgotten papers, I can preserve the story behind them. A site token doesn’t have to stay in my bag forever. It can become part of a journal page with a few sentences about why that event mattered. A feast menu can remind me of the friends around the table instead of simply taking up space in a file drawer.

The paper isn’t really the treasure.

The memory is.

I’ve also discovered something unexpected. Organizing my craft supplies feels a bit like shopping in my own house. I keep finding forgotten embellishments. Beads, paper, ribbon, calligraphy supplies, and all sorts of odds and ends that suddenly inspire new projects. Instead of buying more, I’m asking, “What can I create with what I already have?”

Perhaps that’s a medieval attitude after all.

People in the SCA period didn’t waste good materials. Fabric became patches. Parchment became bindings. Broken metal became new tools. Useful things were repaired, repurposed, passed along, and given another life.

Maybe junk journaling is my twenty-first-century version of that same philosophy.

Use what you have. Tell the story. Preserve the memory. And don’t be afraid to let the extra paper go once its story has found a new home.

Perhaps that’s why so many of us stay in the SCA for decades. We’re not just collecting things. We’re collecting evidence. We become students of material culture without ever realizing there’s a name for it. And as we make our own clothing, tools, books, jewelry, and journals, we quietly become part of that material culture ourselves.

Someday, someone may learn about twenty-first-century historical reenactors not from our Facebook posts, but from the notes in the margin of a class handout, a handwoven pouch, or the battered feast menu glued inside a junk journal.