Beyond Memories: 3 Ways to Fill Your Junk Journal When You Don’t Know What to Write

August 5, 2025

I absolutely love junk journaling my memories. I enjoy going out into the world and looking for paper souvenirs (AKA ephemera) and photos I can take to tell the story later in my journal. But not all of my pages are for memory keeping. Sometimes I open up my junk journal and don’t have anything to document, which used to stop me from journaling.

But this year, I’ve been really leaning into my mantra of creating more than I’m consuming - which means even if I have nothing to document: I still want to be using my journal! So now I am using those times to explore other areas of my creativity and to experiment with tools and materials I haven’t used before.

Here are three ideas for what to do in your junk journal when out want to create but don’t know where to start!

1 - Sticker collage - I know for a fact that you have unused stickers sitting somewhere in a drawer. Stickers that you were given or collected but really don’t have a use for… NOW is time! But those sheets out and start making art with them. You can frame photos with stickers, fill the page with them, create mandala type repeating patterns, the sky is the limit and you can finally throw away some empty sticker backing sheets!

2 - Quote me - Find a quote or lyric that you really like and play with your lettering skills. Paint, marker, sketch, whatever method feels right for you. I will actually screenshot and save quotes & poems I like, that I find online or in the wild, and I will pull them out when I am looking for something fun to write down. I’m really trying to improve my watercolor skills this year so I will usually paint the quotes I want to remember most!

3 - Dots, Lines, & Ligatures - Fill the space with something SUPER basic. If you have dotting markers you can fill the space with dots and tell a story through color choice. If you dont have those, grab your highlighters and start making a series of straight (or curved) lines, see if you cant replicate that line or shape over and over again until the page is filled. Want to be more abstract, you can fill the space with cheetah print, hearts, stars, or random ligatures that mean nothing at all. Try and fill all the negative space.