By Katie Asha, First Year English
As of late, an old hobby is having a quiet resurgence: scrapbooking, aka ‘junk journaling’, is the newest trend online. In an age where tickets, receipts, menus, and the rest of our paper trail is increasingly digitised, people are actively seeking out ways to slow down and document their life via more tactile hobbies. Here’s my case for why everyone should be giving it a go.
‘Junk journaling’ is a hobby involving collecting day-to-day souvenirs – receipts, ticket stubs, postcards, napkins – and creating art from them. The core idea is that even the most small parts of everyday life can contain beauty; and mundane ‘junk’ can be used as a way to document a paper trail of our life. The hobby of scrapbooking could be interpreted as an act of mindfulness and noticing, as it encourages you to become conscious of the small parts of life that bring you joy: an interesting logo printed on a restaurant's napkin; the ticket from the cloakroom at a club; an autumn leaf on the pavement; the receipt from a food shop you did for a meal with a friend.
‘Scrapbooking, as an inherently unfinished, rough, or experimental style of creating art, is extremely forgiving’
If scrapbooking is an act of mindfulness, then surely it has cognitive benefits. Within the chaos of uni life, frantically rushing to your 9am to going out, with the days of the week blurring into one, what are the things that make everyday beautiful? Scrapbooking, as an inherently unfinished, rough, or experimental style of creating art, is extremely forgiving: you don't need to be a professional or maintain a consistent artistic style to do it. You just need a notepad, glue stick, and a pen.
Travel Scrapbooking
Scrapbooking is also a great way to document travelling, as it creates a physical archive of all the big and small things you found special about visiting certain places. A ripped paper napkin or old receipt may on it's surface seem like nothing special, but could hold an association for you with a special moment, favourite meal, or formative event of the trip.
Due to the tactile nature of scrapbooking, its sentimental value is unmatched – it is an amazing feeling to be able to hold a page of your scrapbook and touch a piece of paper held by a different version of you from five, ten, or even fifteen years ago. A junk journal makes the past tangible in a way that digitised media can’t.
Sophia Izwan
Lola Nelson
Primarily, like any creative hobby, scrapbooking is a way of expressing yourself; in this case, through the documentation of things that bring you joy. While a phone's camera roll is distinctly ephemeral, physical art will outlast you until it is destroyed, making it a constant companion that you can show to your friends, family, and future children. Showing someone a specific page in your scrapbook can reveal exactly who you were and what you loved when you created it!
Featured image: Epigram / Katie Asha
Have you ever considered scrapbooking?
