S8Ep 37 The Human Junk Journal! 😊

0:00It's football season and you can now get almost anything you need for Game Day delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? You can't get a running back delivered, but you can get Babyback Ribs delivered. A strong defense? No. A strong deodorant? Yes. The Six Pack of Abs? No. Six Pack of Beer? Yes. Get almost almost anything for Game Day delivered with Uber Eats. Official on-demand food delivery partner of the NFL. Order now. No.21 Plus and Inselect City's product availability varies by agency app for details. Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Whether it's hot yoga, over 100 degree weather, or too much sun. Gatorlight with a specialized blend of five electrolytes was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration. Shop now at Retailers Nationwide. Gatorlight hydrates faster than water. Is it in you? These noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration, consult to healthcare professional and symptoms persist. Hi, everybody.

1:01This is Pam at the Paper Outpost and I've got an interesting topic for you today about junk journaling. I'm going to call this the human journal. Why imperfect, real, and unrepeatable is the next big thing in junk journaling. Michael's cited junk journaling as up 63% 63% in 2026 trend reporting. Pretty interesting. So now AI can make a perfect Victorian lady, a perfect old ledger, a perfect mushroom page, a perfect everything. The breakout counter trend may be the exact opposite. Growth of the human hand, the crooked stitching, handwriting, coffee stains, real ones, grocery receipts, torrents, grabs, failed experiments, real life ephemera, and things that cannot be downloaded twice.

2:03I'm guilty of using both. I love old and real ephemera. I also use AI. It generates things so easily and so quickly. It's amazing. Things that I could never draw or design on my own, but it doesn't feel like the old stuff. It doesn't feel handmade. It doesn't feel like it was lived in. Like there was human there. It's pretty and it serves a role. It has a place and it is convenient, but it's not human at the end of the day. So let's take a look at this. So AI generated and designed junk journal products are becoming easier and easier and more common, which makes this tension immediately timely. The new luxury is something that cannot be duplicated.

3:06A printable can be printed 10,000 times. Your grandmother's handwritten recipe cannot. Okay, there's a huge difference. It's football season and you can now get almost anything you need for game day delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? You can't get a running back delivered, but you can get baby back ribs delivered. A strong defense? No. A strong deodorant? Yes. The six pack of abs? No. Six pack of beer? Yes. Get almost, almost anything for game day delivered with Uber Eats. Official on-demand food delivery partner of the NFL. Order now. Alcohol 21 plus in Inselect City's product availability varies by region. See app for details. Low energy, unfocused, foggy. You might be dehydrated. Gatorade zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body with a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water.

4:08Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist. So you can actively start deliberately collecting one of a kind. One of a one materials. Let's call it that. In grandma's recipe, the actual pencil or pen marks that grandma made on the paper. Used postage scribbled notes, packaging, handwritten lists, receipts, envelopes. You name it. Ask yourself could somebody download this exact page of yes, add something they can't? The future of junk drilling may become valuable because of its uniqueness rather than its perfection. I think that's a huge part of the fascination of the world of junk journals.

5:09Put evidence of your actual life back into the journal. Junk journals begin with junk, ordinary remnants of living. At a grocery street, a coffee sleeve, a tea tag, a clothing tag, a parking staff, or junk mail. It's okay and it's real and it's real life. Record ridiculous details rather than only major milestones. Preserve handwriting, even messy handwriting. Create pages that say, hey, a human actually lived here. This lines up with the growing overlap between junk journaling and everyday memory keeping. Recent craft discussions are specifically highlighting ordinary objects and tiny moments as creative material. The beautiful mistake moment. Oh, I live in that realm. Stop repairing every crooked stitch. Leave the torn edge that tore in the wrong place.

6:10Is that fun with that the other day actually? Cover mistakes partially instead of completely. Let them see the errors, the mistakes, the wounds, all the things that make it innately human. Let glue marks, paints, mirrors are uneven stamping, become evidence of the process as opposed to something to hide. Try making one page where you're not, were you forbid yourself to redo anything? And this could be a fantastic challenge. Show me the mistake you decided to keep. I would love to see some of your mistakes that you decided to keep and how you honored them in your junk journals. Make junk journals that cannot be recreated even by you. This is where I think the concept gets really interesting. Give yourself a random bag of scraps in 30 minutes. Create without returning to your usual supplies and incorporate something you found that day.

7:11Let chance determine part of that page by blindly grabbing three scraps and using them. When the page is finished, don't reverse engineer it into a kit. Let it remain one of one. The last point is provocative because the online craft economy constantly encourages creators to turn everything successful into something repeatable and sellable. What if some art is allowed to exist only once? From junk journal to human time capsule, this is where you can take the journal deeper. Imagine somebody discovering your journal 75 years from now. What would actually tell them who you were? Today's worthless objects may become tomorrow's fascinating ephemera. Include prices, phrases, packaging, handwriting, ordinary, photordinary photographs. They don't have to be black and white. They don't have to be from 100 years ago, maybe from last week.

8:14How about cultural remnants, things that are laying around that maybe remind you of Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever it is that you're celebrating? Stop asking only is this pretty and start asking, does this preserve something? Maybe the next evolution of junk journaling isn't making our journals prettier. Maybe it's making them more human. Because I would not claim nobody has ever discussed authenticity or memory keeping. People certainly have, but the specific framing, the human journal, as the handmade counter movement to the AI perfect craft imagery looks much less saturated. And it connects directly to what's happening culturally right now. I think this feels fresh and new in the world of junk journals.

9:15And it's almost like we're coming full circle. The human junk journal is strong enough it could become more than what we think with all its foibles, errors, mistakes, crooked stitching. I think it lives in a place all its own time capsule, its own reality, its own breath of life. It shows there was a human here. Maybe there were multiple humans. I know I've lived quite a journey collecting and collecting and collecting and, oh I think it's so excited about handwritten letters. So fascinated with old antique checks in the 1800s and early 1900s. I love them. Like potato chips, I love them. And old receipts. I mean, I love to see what people bought. I love to see the calligraphy, the handwriting, the curse of writing of the way they wrote up the receipts.

10:16What little details they put on the receipts that we just don't do today. How old documents were folded up and the date was put on the outside with a little description of what it was. And they were all folded a very simple way. You could spot a business document or a government document quite easily by the way it was folded with the date on the outside. I was fascinated by the Memento Mori photography to honor the dead in Victorian times. Just looking at these traditions and why people did what they did and how there were these little remnants of that culture at the time that was left for the rest of us to find. And then we can share it with others. That's why I don't mind getting an old book and taking it apart and taking the pages apart and sharing those pages with you in a funnel.

11:18I call it a funnel. It's a collection of old ephemera things. This is not a pitch to cell fundals. This is just why I put them in there. I think the texture, the tactile nature of the individual book page, the different feel of these old book pages. They feel different. They smell different. They look different. They sit different. They sit different in the book. They have different edging, different sewing, different stitches, different ways they've been put together. It's fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. This is definitely a bridge we're walking right now. While I think AI is here to stay and it serves a place, whether you love it or hate it, it doesn't matter.

12:21I think it's here. Personally, I think it's a tool. I think it can be something that can be used for good or used for not good. It's totally up to the user. I do not think it replaces the human experience. I wish I could personally create enough art that I wouldn't ever feel the want or desire to put a mushroom on the back of a butterfly that had a little fairy coming out of the mushroom door. But I don't necessarily have the skill to design that quickly. But I can quickly with AI. But I can find pieces of history and I can put them in other people's hands and I can share the richness of somebody else's life with others. I think there's a lot of people who are still fascinated with the human experience that a lot of these old ephemeral pieces convey and they hold.

13:36There's something about holding a handwritten letter. Sometimes it's by a young boy. I remember finding this old diary and it was actually written during the times of when the war of the worlds was written. And the old story went that it was a radio play and it went on to the radio and a lot of people mistakenly thought it was a true story and that aliens were invading. And it was this boy's young boy's account of hearing it on the radio. And he did not believe it was real, which was interesting. But he said a lot. I think a lot of his friends and his family did and I actually gave that to the very first woman who ever bought a junk journal from me. And I was so touched and moved by the fact that she bought a junk journal. And I was thinking, oh my gosh, and this I want to think her some way. So I sent her this. It was from a journal or from a diary and I sent her those pages and she was really thrilled.

14:43And that was such a good thing. So when you reach back into the attic trunk, maybe it's your attic trunk, maybe it's your mother's attic trunk, maybe it's your grandmother's attic trunk. I've dealt with a few attic trunks in my day. There was it was actually more of a basement trunk, a couple basement suitcases. And there were some trunks actually. My mom loved turtleback trunks, so we had a few of those. And I, Ash, I would like to say that they were filled with treasures and stories and photo albums and stuff like that. But my parents were not big drinkers, but they did have a turtle back trunk and that is where alcohol was stored. It was stored in the basement in the TV room and it collected dust and nobody ever drank out of that thing.

15:47But it was there and that's where it was. So that was what was in our turtle back trunk. But that's kind of a weird story. But yeah, so, but I have come across at times. Sometimes people have passed away and you do get papers from maybe their world. And although I have, the only one I've actually made into a junk journal from my family was my grandmother and a little bit of my grandfather in there as well. On my dad's side, I wanted to build a journal that would house their memory of the things that I had in it. And it housed their journey over on the Kunard ship line. My grandmother's primarily because my grandfather came first from Hungary and then she followed with her two boys later. And there were letters, I think I've told you a little bit about this before, but there were handwritten letters.

16:50In Hungarian, with the smallest hand writing, I think I've ever seen it was amazing how valuable it was paper space and space on the letter page to write. And every little spot of blank paper was used up on my grandmother's tiny, tiny, tiny writing. It looked like my grandfather must have saved all her letters. And so the journey with those letters was, I couldn't read them because I didn't understand Hungarian. And I originally had a friend translate one letter for me who happened to be Hungarian. But it took her so long because it was an old-fashioned broken Hungarian as opposed to a new modern Hungarian. And so it was a little difficult for her. She was pretty much done after the one letter and I had a stack. So then I switched to, I thought I'd hire somebody. And so I sent this woman some photos of the letters.

17:56And she said they were so moving and so impactful she could barely bring herself to read them. And then she never told me what was in them. And I'm like, oh my god, you gotta be kidding. And then she disappeared. But now with AI, I think I can take photos and put them into AI and ask it to translate. So I'm going to do that. I haven't done that yet. But I would like to do that because I've been able to do that with some gothic text. Sometimes I'll get a book that has that beautiful old German gothic text style writing. And I don't know what the book is about. But I can take a picture of the page and ask, you know, AI, what it says, where is the book from? And it's amazing. The information that the AI can pull just from looking at a few pages of the book. All of a sudden it'll know the title of the book, the authors, when it was published, where it was published, what country it's from, and a whole history about the book. And my mother used to tell me,

18:59I mean, my mother, my dad was Hungarian, my mother was Ukrainian. And my mother used to tell me she found my grandfather in this old book, a military book, it was his picture, and a little bit about him and what he did. And uh... It's football season and you can now get almost anything you need for game day, delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? You can't get a running back delivered, but you can get baby back ribs delivered. A strong defense? No. A strong deodorant? Yes. The six pack of abs? No. Six pack of beer? Yes. Get almost anything for game day, delivered with Uber Eats. Official on-demand food delivery partner of the NFL. Order now. Alcohol 21 plus in Inselect City's product availability varies by region, see app for details. Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body, with a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors.

20:00Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going, shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration, consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist. She thought it was quite interesting because it was in an Austrian army book and my grandfather was Ukrainian. So that was interesting. So now, all of a sudden, I could take this pictures of the book. It actually had a picture of my grandfather right there. And I could just take a picture of it. An AI explained to me everything about the book. How it came to pass. He was in an Austrian army military book. And what that meant at the time in those circumstances, the way people lived and how he ended up there. And I thought it was totally fascinating. So to me, it does, the AI does hold a place in a purpose,

21:03but not necessarily for the things that we all think. It's a tool and it's an amazing tool, but it's not everything. And, you know, the ability for AI to translate my grandmother's letters or find out the history of my grandfather is invaluable to me. But my grandmother and my grandfather are way more invaluable to me. But understanding more about them is really nice. It's like the icing on the cake. So I look forward to exploring more newness and more antiques and more vintage things. Just the feel, just the fun, just the journey and the treasures that abound that we can still find. Paper is disappearing from our world. It sounds like an endangered species, but in a way it is because everything is going to the screen. Children are not learning how to write anymore. We've heard that.

22:05We don't write handwritten letters the way we used to. We don't even send birthday cards, Christmas cards anymore. We text everything and do all that sort of thing. Yeah, paper is disappearing. So let's consider ourselves very lucky to still have the opportunity to touch and play with it and feel it and honor it and understand that other humans touch this as well. There is so much in those papers that is unspoken. And we bring to life or to light the treasures that are within by sharing them with each other, talking about them, feeling them, touching them, enjoying them and wondering about who touched this paper. What did it mean to somebody? What were they thinking? What were they doing? What was their life like? Yeah.

23:05So just a little pondering from afar. Hope you enjoyed this topic and we'll be talking to you soon. I do have 40% off DigiKits in September and a Christmas Ephemeral bundle kit if interested. Take care everybody and happy crafting.