My New Junk Journal: January So Far

 

I had such a lovely walk on January 1st.  It was cold and frosty and quiet.  As I walked on the upper part of the back yard path towards the old field road, I heard a branch or leaf in the woods next to me.  Two does emerged and ran across Sam's field across the fence.  

I walked down the field road towards my brother's drive, then turned into the wide-open field that is Sam's.  I heard something north/huff behind me.  I turned and looked and saw nothing.  Started back uphill and again heard the north/huff sound.  Again, I turned and saw nothing.  Then it happened a third time.  I realized it was a buck trying to scare me off.  "Oh, go away!  You've got hundreds of acres you can roam; you don't need this little space!"  The buck took off through the woods. 

Crows began cawing loudly in the trees, their cries echoing in the still morning air.

This was what I wanted to capture for memory, and I thought it would be fun to make it my first finished page in the 2026 journal...

I'd one for a very early morning walk on New Year's Day.  Pale blue sky, cold, frost, deer, crows cawing, and the tracery of bare branches...Though these photos are not mine, they do capture the mood/memory of that morning walk very well.

I'd batted around several ideas for junk journal formats.  Making a month-by-month journal, just making seasonal ones, making monthly journals, etc.  

When I was at my desk later, I picked up the old planner I'd just finished using and thought that the covers would make a lovely base cover for a new junk journal.  

The purpose of a junk journal, aside from the creativity factor is to repurpose and reuse items that normally we might be tempted to throw away.  And the base for the pages are used pieces of paper.  And the planner was just full of pages...Why was I thinking I could only use the covers?!

The pages in the old planner are 7.5 x 9.5, roomy enough for images or art and a little blurb of journaling to remind me why I wanted those images on that page. And here I'd been planning to rip out all those old pages!  

I can't say the idea was entirely original.   One of you (Kim?) mentioned using a notebook for your own junk journal and I thought, "Well why not repurpose this rather than trash it?"  I'd already been tossing around the idea of using a proper three-ring binder, you know one of those half- sized planner types because hole punching is a lot easier than binding pages.

As you can see the pages are neat and not overly fussy, unlike the junk journal I made at Christmas.  Mind you this is not my main journal.  It's meant more to be a month-by-month visual reminder of things I saw, thought or experienced, but not an outpouring of my deepest, innermost, private thoughts.  

I thought you might enjoy a look at January so far...

This image is actually a photo of a staircase that I turned on its side.  That gave me lines I used to write on.  The stack of colorful quilts reminds me of sleeping on quilt palettes at my grandmothers' homes. Since this page was about time spent with family, it seemed an appropriate image to include.

I wrote about mine and John's date day...Not the day we'd planned but I reminded myself that he is my Prince Charming and time together is precious.

This image was a reminder of "The Year of Enough"...Not just the post but the fact of what I'd been given (or what I had already) this month.

Money became an obsessive thought for part of the month, and I was sick of it, so I devoted a page to that.  Note the tag that slips over between the former page and this one, "ENOUGH"...I made fake dollar bills to stuff in the envelope on the page, a reminder that I have money enough for all my needs.

Both these pages were covered with a pretty background paper that made me think of a sweet old-fashioned wallpaper and images I printed off from Pinterest that related to a workspace of my own and all that I hoped it would be.