How to Make an Autumn Junk Journal

A junk journal is part notebook, part scrapbook and part accidental archive.

Instead of starting with pristine pages and deciding how they should look, you slowly fill them with the things that pass through ordinary life: receipts, tickets, photographs, labels, notes, scraps of paper, packaging, pressed leaves, handwriting and whatever else feels worth keeping.

An autumn junk journal simply gives that idea a season.

It might begin with the first genuinely cold morning and end somewhere around the point when autumn starts slipping into winter. Or you might keep adding to it for years.

There are no rules about what deserves a place in it.

That coffee receipt may remind you of a rainy Saturday in a way a carefully posed photograph never could. The ugly little cinema ticket might eventually become the thing that takes you straight back to an October evening.

That's what I like about it.

You're not documenting the impressive parts of a season.

You're keeping evidence that you were there for the ordinary ones.

Very little.

And this is where I think junk journaling can go slightly wrong.

Search for the hobby for five minutes and it becomes remarkably easy to believe you need seventeen varieties of paper, specialist stamps, vintage stickers, six rolls of washi tape and an entirely new drawer in which to organise it all.

You don't. In fact, start with a notebook, old journal or inexpensive sketchbook; scissors; glue or double-sided tape; a pen; and whatever paper things are already finding their way into your life. That's enough.

If you already own tape, stamps, coloured pencils or other craft supplies, wonderful. Use them. But part of the charm is making something from what would otherwise have been thrown away.

You don't need to collect all thirty.

Think of this as something to return to when you look at an empty page and suddenly forget every object you've encountered in your entire life.

1. A photograph from the first day that properly felt like autumn

2. A bookshop receipt

3. Your current reading list

4. The wrapper or label from a favourite autumn snack

5. A tea or coffee label

6. A handwritten recipe

7. A photograph of something you baked

8. A cinema ticket

9. The name of whatever you watched on a rainy evening

10. A pressed autumn leaf

11. A dried flower

12. Ribbon from a parcel

13. A perfume blotter

14. A note about the scent you wore that month

15. A café card

16. A piece of particularly lovely packaging

17. A grocery receipt from a cosy dinner at home

18. The songs you had on repeat

19. A small printed screenshot of your October playlist

20. A line from a book

21. A tiny sketch

22. A note about the first properly cold morning

23. The date you finally put the heating on

24. A photograph of your home at around 5PM

25. Something funny someone said

26. A list of what you're currently loving

27. A ticket from an autumn day out

28. A tiny piece of a map

29. Your favourite meal of the month

30. One completely ordinary thing you don't want to forget

Don't start by trying to tell the story of autumn.

Start with Tuesday.

Or Sunday afternoon. Or the day you went into town for one thing and somehow came home with a new book.

Choose one small moment and gather three to five things that belong to it.

A photograph. A receipt. A leaf. A scrap from The Amberfell Papers. A sentence you want to remember.

Put the largest piece down first.

Then move the smaller things around it. Let something overlap. Tear an edge if everything starts looking suspiciously neat. Add the date somewhere.

Write a sentence if you want to. Or don't.

Then stick it down. That's your first page.

You do not need a colour scheme. You do not need to know what the next page will look like. And you definitely don't need to wait until you've collected something more interesting.

The ordinary stuff is the interesting stuff.

This might be the hardest part.

There are spectacular junk journals online. Layers upon layers of perfect vintage paper, beautiful handwriting, elaborate pockets and pages that look as though they belong behind glass.

I love looking at them.

I would also never finish one.

For me, the point of an autumn junk journal is almost the opposite.

It should be allowed to have a wonky photograph. A receipt that isn’t remotely the right colour. Handwriting you did too quickly. A page that worked better in your head.

If every object has to earn its place aesthetically, you'll start editing the season before you've even finished living it.

Let some of it be ugly. Let some of it be mundane.

A junk journal should look collected, not designed.

I did, however, make you some paper.

The Amberfell Papers is a free twelve-page autumn junk journal kit made for exactly this kind of afternoon.

There are library cards for the books you're reading, October tickets, scraps for ordinary autumn days, little notes worth keeping, spaces for photographs and pressed finds, Amberfell ephemera and words to cut out and tuck between the things you’ve collected yourself.

Use all of it. Use one tiny label. Print the same page twice. Tear something in half. Write over it.

It isn't precious. It's paper.

There is no requirement to turn this into an autumn ritual.

But if the weather happens to be dreadful, I can think of worse ways to spend an hour.

Print a few pages. Put one of the Amberfell playlists on. Make something warm to drink. Put your phone somewhere you can't automatically pick it up every forty seconds.

Then empty out the little pile of paper you've been keeping. Receipts. Photographs. Labels. Tickets. Leaves. Whatever you've got.

Spread everything across the table and see what belongs together.

You don't have to finish the journal. You don't even have to finish a page.

An hour in which nothing useful is required of you is already rather a good use of an autumn afternoon.

I suspect the pages I would eventually love most wouldn’t be the beautiful ones.

They'd be the page with the coffee receipt. The photograph I nearly deleted. The ridiculous thing somebody said over dinner. The first evening it became dark noticeably too early.

A supermarket receipt beside a note saying that dinner was particularly good.

Things that would never make it into a traditional photo album because nothing important happened.

And then, years later, somehow they become the important things.

That's the reason to make one.

Not to preserve autumn perfectly. Just to leave yourself enough little pieces to find your way back.