Junk journal grimoires combine spellwork, journaling, and creativity to record magical recipes, reflections, manifestations, and more. Perfect for witches who love collecting and crafting, this creative and flexible approach combines spellwork, journaling, and artistic expression—all while embracing imperfection!
This post contains affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission on qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.
As witches, we pour our energy, intentions, and creativity into every aspect of our practice. Our grimoires, books of shadows, and magical journals hold a sacred place in our craft, serving as both practical resources and deeply personal expressions of who we are as magical practitioners. However, creating and maintaining these magical books can sometimes feel overwhelming, especially with the stunningly elaborate spellbooks of Hollywood cinema looming in our consciousness.
Enter the junk journal grimoire—a creative, flexible, and stress-free alternative to the traditional book of shadows. Whether you’re new to witchcraft or a seasoned practitioner, a junk journal can help you put your magical practice to paper in a way that feels intuitive and deeply personal. In this post, I’ll share five reasons why I believe every witch should consider keeping a junk journal grimoire.
1. Junk Journal Grimoires Embrace Imperfection
One of the biggest struggles we witches face when creating a traditional grimoire is the pressure to make it perfect. Blank pages stare back at us, demanding beautiful calligraphy, carefully curated layouts, and polished designs that seem impossible to achieve. This pressure often leads to procrastination, abandonment, or grimoires that feel too intimidating or too special to use regularly.
A junk journal grimoire solves this problem by embracing and celebrating chaos and imperfection. Junk journals rarely have what one would truly call “blank” pages. Whether you start by repurposing an old book (known as an “altered book” style of junk journal), buying a ready-made junk journal (I sometimes sell the journals I make), or binding your own junk journal grimoire from mismatched and repurposed papers (so fulfilling!), you’re starting with pre-loved or decorative materials—old book pages, wrapping paper, scrapbook paper, old greeting cards, catalogs, calendars, packaging, or even junk mail. It’s expected that you’ll paint or glue over many of the pages anyway. If you “mess up,” you can simply glue or paint over it again, or even tear out a page without disrupting the flow of your journal. The layers are part of the process, and part of the aesthetic.
For half-formed ideas or notes you aren’t ready to commit to a permanent spot, junk journals offer built-in flexibility. Write your thoughts on loose stationery or scrap paper, tuck them into a pocket or envelope, and revisit them later. You can remove or rearrange entries as your practice evolves, making it easy to keep your grimoire relevant to your current practice. If, on the other hand, you decide you want to add a page in an already bound book, you can make it a tip in!
The low-pressure environment of a junk journal grimoire encourages creativity and experimentation, letting your practice flourish freely in ways a traditional journal might not.
2. A Beautiful Home for Magical Keepsakes & Treasures
Crystals. Herbs. Cards. Jars. If you’re a witch, chances are you’ve got a little (or not so little) collecting habit. And chances are, some of the meaningful & magical things you collect are relatively small and flat, and you might even need somewhere to put them. From pressed flowers and handwritten notes to evocative photos, meaningful ephemera, and symbols of energy you desire to manifest, witches are natural collectors. We gather treasures and tokens imbued with significance, each carrying a story or vibration we want to keep close. But where do you put all these tiny treasures?
A junk journal grimoire is the perfect place for your dragon hoard of treasured ephemera and imagery! Unlike a traditional journal or grimoire with lined pages and perfect layouts, a junk journal is a creative scrapbook of layered paper, envelopes, pockets, flaps, tip-ins, and tuck spots. You can add pressed flowers, paste in dried herbs, or include photos of your seasonal altar. Do you love (even collect, perhaps?) stickers or witchy washi tape? Add them without worrying about “rules” or disrupting a polished look. The eclectic, patchwork style of a junk journal means your grimoire will feel vibrant and alive, reflecting your own magic and the energy and evolution of your practice.
Three-dimensional charms, beads, and tiny trinkets can also be included in a junk journal grimoire by creating a decorative charm tassel, attaching them to the ends of ribbon bookmarks, or hanging them from your journal’s closure.
3. Record Recipes, Spells, Readings, and Witchy Wisdom in Your Junk Journal Grimoire
Your grimoire is more than a book—it’s a magical archive of your craft. A junk journal grimoire offers the perfect space to record and reflect on the many aspects of your witchy practice, whether you’re capturing the details of a successful spell, jotting down recipes, or preserving bits of magical knowledge for future reference. The creative format of a junk journal allows you to arrange this information in ways that feel intuitive and accessible, making it a joy to revisit.
Spellwork
Spellwork benefits greatly from this flexible journaling style. After performing a spell, write down the process on loose paper (or tear some sheets out of a lined journal you never filled up) and tuck it into a pocket or clip it to a page. Include details like the date, moon phase, method, ingredients, incantations, and your intentions. Once the spell manifests, you can make it a permanent part of your grimoire, celebrating its success and refining your magical approach. Spells that don’t turn out as planned can be relegated to a special envelope and reviewed for later reference, or can be removed altogether.
I also like to do spellwork in my junk journal grimoires, but we’ll talk about that in section four!
Potions & Recipes
For kitchen witches, a junk journal grimoire is the ultimate recipe book, combining practicality with creativity. Record your recipes on individual cards and insert them into pockets and tuck spots, to be pulled out when you need to reference them. Keep track of your favorite magical recipes, from herbal teas and magical oils to healing soups and simmer pot spells. Include notes on the magical properties of ingredients, and the results of your kitchen witchery workings.
If potion-making is part of your practice, jot down your processes and results—did your aura cleansing spray leave you feeling cleansed and refreshed? Did your potion of mental clarity clear your mind and help you focus? With space for reflection and experimentation, your junk journal becomes not just a collection of recipes but a chronicle of your craft, evolving with your practice.
One cool way to do this would be to have a page dedicated to a base recipe, like a recipe for a plain body butter. Write the base recipe on the outside of a big pocket, and then tuck individual cards for the various scented and enchanted additions into the pocket, with notes on the intention for each variation and the purpose of each magical herb or essential oil in the blend.
Divination
Divinatory readings also find a natural home in a junk journal grimoire.
Whether you’re journaling tarot readings, rune casts, tea leaf interpretations, or dream insights, your junk journal grimoire allows you to capture the moment. Leave space for later reflections or updates as patterns emerge or guidance becomes clear. This not only enhances your understanding of the messages you’ve received but also creates a record of your intuitive growth.
You can use tarot stickers or carve your own rune stamps to keep a visual record of your readings. Log tea leaf readings or found omens by inserting small photos from a sticker photo printer (this is the one I use). If you’re wild like me and break up some of your tarot and oracle decks to make a crazy hybrid basketcase deck (or something similar), you can even keep some particularly meaningful cards in your journal (temporarily or not, up to you!). You could even tuck in a printout of a tarot meanings or rune meanings cheat sheet!
Connecting with Nature
For we witches who love connecting with nature, use your junk journal to document the local flora and fauna you encounter. Press wildflowers or herbs from your garden and jot down their names, lore, and magical properties, building a personal guide to the natural world around you.
I saved the first fluffy blossom that fell from the big cottonwood tree the spring I lived at Cottonwood Cottage in a little glassine envelope, and the memory of that day lives vividly in my heart—and in my first junk journal grimoire (watch the flipthrough here).
Then, my first spring at Climbing Rose Cottage, I pressed a ton of wildflowers from the backyard acreage. In summer, when they had fully flattened and dried, I used a heavy gel gloss medium to mount a whole bunch of them to a single spread in my junk journal grimoire, celebrating the beauty of the land I live on.
Magical Correspondences & Reference Material
Finally, your junk journal grimoire can house a wealth of magical reference material. Keep lists of correspondences, astrological birth charts, tarot card meanings, herbal properties, or even myths and legends that inspire your practice.
By using your junk journal grimoire as a repository for spells, readings, reflections, and knowledge, you create a living record of your craft—one that’s not only practical but also deeply meaningful.
Admittedly, I don’t really tend to keep much in the way of reference information in my own junk journal grimoires… but you certainly can! That’s the beauty of a junk journal grimoire. It can be whatever you want it to be!
4. A Junk Journal Grimoire Is a Portable Altar for Your Magical Practice
A junk journal grimoire isn’t just a place to store keepsakes or record magical knowledge for later reference; it’s a functional tool for your magical work. In fact, it can even serve as an altar – the place where you perform magical workings! Its versatile pages can be transformed into:
- Vision boards: Create collages or other visual artworks of the energy and outcomes you’re manifesting.
- Sigil and rune magic: Draw sigils, runes, or other magical symbols directly into your journal or on small slips of paper you can insert and later remove. Runescripts, bindrunes, and sigil magic all naturally take to paper, so it only seems natural to include them in your junk journal grimoire.
- Art Magic: Any magic that can be done via a relatively flat medium can go in a junk journal! This can include meditative mandalas, visionary self portraits, or even spell envelopes (like spell jars, but… envelopes)! I’ve even developed a method for doing candle spells in my journal, and once made a spell jar with a big clear jar sticker!
- Affirmations: Write out empowering affirmations and decorate them with artwork or embellishments that resonate with your intentions. Use this to practice your hand lettering or calligraphy, or print out your words of power in a font you love and glue them in! You can also keep a manifestation list, and/or a record of incantations or meaningful poetry or lyrics you love.
- Shrines: Use painting, drawing, stamping, and collage to craft beautiful shrines and devotional artwork to your deities, ancestors, or local land spirits.
- Portable Altar: When I said your junk journal grimoire could be a portable altar earlier, I meant that it’s a sacred space and you can make magic on any page… but you can also literally make a spread in your journal that serves as a portable altar space to do readings and spells on top of.
- Anything else you can dream of!
Whether you’re designing a ritual, crafting a spell, or meditating on a particular theme, a junk journal grimoire provides the flexibility to incorporate your creative process directly into your magical record.
5. Junk Journal Grimoires Let Your Divine Creative Spark Shine
Journaling is a cornerstone of many witchcraft practices. Whether you’re recording tarot readings, meditation insights, spellwork, shamanic journeys, dream interpretations, or affirmations, putting pen to paper deepens your connection to your craft. But why stop at functional when your journaling can also be fun?
A junk journal grimoire transforms this essential practice into an act of creative expression. Instead of plain pages and rigid formats, you can weave your divine creative energy into every page. Decorate your reflections with artwork, collages, pressed flowers, or embellishments that bring your magical energy to life. This approach not only makes journaling more enjoyable but also allows your grimoire to become a deeply personal artifact of your journey.
But it’s more than that. A junk journal grimoire doesn’t just contain a record of your magical knowledge and experiences. When you work in your junk journal grimoire, you’re not just adding information. You are participating in a magical creative process. The mere process of gluing paper to paper and making marks on a page is a magical act of integration, meditation, and mental and emotional processing.
By treating your grimoire as a creative outlet, you give yourself permission to experiment, make mistakes, and let your intuition guide you. It’s not just about what you write but how you express yourself, creating a harmonious blend of creativity and magic that not only evolves alongside your practice, but also becomes a part of your magical practice.
How to Start Your Junk Journal Grimoire
Ready to give the junk journal approach a try? Here are some tips to get started:
1. Choose a Base for Your Junk Journal Grimoire
Use a blank notebook or an old hardcover book as your base, or purchase a handmade junk journal grimoire, or make your own.
I always prefer to make my own, since it feels more personal and I absolutely adore the process of picking out paper and building the signatures. However, if you don’t have materials that inspire you and don’t want to go down the infinitely deep rabbit hole of collecting old books and cabbage-dying printer paper just to have the gorgeous junk journal grimoire of your dreams, you can purchase a journal handmade specifically for this style of journaling from someone like me, or you can alter a book to be used as a journal.
If you decide to go the altered book route, a few things to keep in mind:
- Cover: Choose a hardcover with a cover you like, and ideally even a title that feels poignant to you.
- Paper Quality: Be selective about the quality of the paper. Matte is by far preferable to glossy, and thicker paper is better.
- Sewn Signatures: Look for a book that has stitched in signatures instead of glued pages.
- Remove Pages: Carefully remove about 2/3 of the folios from each signature (try not to disrupt the stitching) before you begin working in the book as a journal. If you don’t remove enough pages, the book will get way too thick way too quickly as you add paint or glue in other papers, it’ll develop gator mouth, and you’ll damage the spine.
2. Gather Tools & Materials for Your Junk Journal Grimoire
Look for old books, scrapbook paper, envelopes, ribbon, stickers, and anything else that inspires you. Thrift stores, art supply stores, craft supply shops, and stationery shops are treasure troves for junk journaling materials.
Should I do a post about my favorite junk journaling tools and supplies? Maybe I will, but here’s the short version:
- The best glue ever for paper to paper. Dries super fast, the precision tip is a dream. I’ll never go back. I do prefer to move it into these smaller bottles for ease of use. Note: DO NOT LOSE THE PIN! If you do, here’s the link you’ll need.
That was a really short list lol, but I’m confident you can figure most other things out yourself by poking around on youtube. To help you, here are all my videos about junk journaling tips and ideas, all my junk journal with me videos, and all my video flipthroughs of handmade junk journals for inspiration.
There are also a ton of other great creators out there! Would you be interested in my recommendations?
3. Abandon Thought and Let the Dream Descend
I like to work in a mix of “front to back” and “wherever I want.” I keep one junk journal grimoire that I call my Kitchen Witch Companion (see the video above) for all my recipes and kitchen witchery. Everything else goes in my current junk journal grimoire, which I switch out whenever it fills up, every 6 to 12 months. I generally like to work in the front section first and move my way towards the back as I fill it up, but I also like to flip around and choose a page that inspires me and feels right as the base for whatever it is I feel like creating that day. Some pages I like so much as they are that I don’t add anything to them at all.
My current junk journal is always part journal, part grimoire, part scrapbook. As you turn the pages, you’ll find pictures of my baby and my birthday cake beside seasonal tarot readings; visual spells next to favorite quotes; and housewarming cards mixed in amongst manifestation lists. In my opinion, this is how it should be!
I mean, you can choose a proper system of organization for your grimoire if you want, but personally this is what I’ve found to be true for me:
When I decide ahead of time how I want to organize a journal, I set a standard that I always ultimately fail to meet. I end up feeling dissatisfied with the organizational system I originally chose or pressured to uphold a certain standard, and often even abandon the journal altogether. As opposed to…
When I let myself put whatever I want wherever I want, I enjoy the process, I journal much more frequently, and I love the outcome. It may not feel perfect, but it feels personal. It feels mine.
A Junk Journal Grimoire Will Transform Your Craft
The beauty of a junk journal grimoire is that it not only evolves alongside your practice, it becomes part of your practice. It’s a living, breathing book (okay maybe not quite lol) filled with your magical journey, from the magic hiding in your cherished everyday moments to your most profound spells, readings, and rituals.
By embracing the flexibility, creativity, and low-pressure nature of a junk journal grimoire, you’ll discover a tool that not only contains a record of your craft but also enhances your connection to it. If you’ve been searching for a way to make your grimoire feel more personal and magical, there’s no better place to start than with a junk journal.
So, gather your (flat-ish) treasures, summon your creativity, and start crafting a junk journal grimoire that reflects your unique witchy path. And of course – don’t hesitate to reach out or leave a comment below with any questions you may have!
Until we meet again – be well, seek beauty, and leave a little magic wherever you go.
Blessings,
Leave a Reply