Leslie Tyger has a thing for keeping stuff. Receipts, ticket stubs, wrappers, junk mail — you know, stuff.
But, she never knew what to do with all of these little pieces of life. Until the artist, who goes by the name Tyger Teeth, started junk journaling.
"I've always collected scraps ever since I was little. I have boxes and boxes of random stuff, you know, that people might look at and they would call it junk, and to me they were, you know, my little treasures," Tyger said.
Now, she runs a Junk Journal Club almost every week at a gallery space downtown, where like-minded collectors come together to "junk journal."
Tyger came to KJZZ's studios recently to talk about how it all started — by happy accident.
Full conversation
LESLIE TYGER: Junk journaling is already a thing, and I think in some senses it's been a thing for a very long time, but people haven't given it a name. Scrapbooking is, you know, kind of the mother, I think, of junk journaling.
So of course we all know there's been scrapbooking for a long time, and it was kind of people who did it more casually and with things that you wouldn't usually use whenever you're doing a scrapbook.
People get scared of doing scrapbooking because it's so, it feels very intense. For example, not to drag my mom, but she always talks about how she still has not finished my baby book because she's stressed to do it. She's like all this stuff, but it's just so hard to put it together.
So I think that it takes that stress out of it and people are just like, oh, these are some pretty napkins, these are some, you know, beautiful things that I have and I'm just going to sort of start putting them into a page.
Some people like to journal along with it, put photos. People have all these different styles. Some of them are very messy and some of those are the most interesting ones.
LAUREN GILGER: Now, Tyger runs a junk journal club almost every week at a gallery space downtown where like-minded collectors come together to junk journal. But as she told me when she came into our studios recently, it all started as sort of a happy accident.
TYGER: So I am an artist, so I started out, you know, vending sort of my art. I had, you know, prints and totes and, you know, postcards and all of those little things, and I just had like some scraps because I was making stickers. And I was like, well, these are so, they're so pretty. They're just like pretty colors.
I don't know what to do with them, so I'm going to put them in a container. I'll bring them to a market and I'll put free scraps. I put an envelope next to it and was like, whatever, if people want them, they can, if it gets people closer to my booth to chat with me and look at my stuff, that's a bonus.
And it was kind of a hit, like everybody who came over, not everybody, but the girls who get it get it. So the ones who get it came over and were like, oh my gosh, scraps. And they would be packing these little pretty pieces of paper into their own envelopes. And all of them would say, oh my gosh, I really want to get into junk journaling or oh, I do junk journaling or I'm going to go do this with my friend soon.
And I just saw like a spark and an interest and an excitement that I didn't know other people had in this kind of thing.
GILGER: So you've got a book here of some of the examples of how you have junk journaled, and you brought a bunch of stuff to show us how this comes together. OK, and we have our producer here as well, Amber Victoria Singer, who is into this and wants to try it, brought her own pile of junk, for lack of a better phrase.
TYGER: I love what she's doing over there.
GILGER: OK, so what kinds of things first of all, do you both have? Describe this for us.
AMBER VICTORIA SINGER: I've brought with me some scraps from a date I went on last week. I have the receipt from where we ate Cibo, and then I have Joe's Italian Ice receipt. I have a ticket to “Shrek” at Pollack Cinemas. I plan good dates.
GILGER: That’s a good date.
SINGER: That's a good ginger candy wrapper from a ginger candy I was eating at their house after. I've stolen from Leslie a jack and a 10 of hearts on July 10th.
GILGER: Oh wow, man, so it's a memory keeper in a way, but it's also just super random, right?
TYGER: A little bit, a little bit like it, it can be random. I have a ton of pages that really random and I encourage people to do random and less of something really specifically calls to you. Like I have here, this one that I'm looking at is a, I have a couple of spreads from a trip that I recently took to Moab with my boyfriend.
And here are some of the things that I have here. I have Pepto-Bismol because I ended up getting food poisoning halfway to Utah. That's awesome. So I have, you know, my, my Pepto-Bismol there to remember it.
I have some printed out photos from the trip. You know, I have a postcard, a little label of a beer, picture of our campsite. We had like some dice that we opened, so I have the packaging from the dice, like a hot dog, tray, I guess, not used. I asked them if they had two and they're like, I'm like, yeah, you can have two, you crazy lady. I don't know what you want it for, but OK.
So, from our champagne, I have, you know, the, this is one of my favorite things to junk journal with, is the foil from champagne bottles. Here's the netting and a photo of it.
GILGER: So you mix in photos, but it's very textured, right? Like, I don't know, does this feel tangible to you in a way that, that maybe like a digital version of this would not?
TYGER: Oh, absolutely, and don't get me started. I think that, I, I, I am a big fan of the digital world, but I'm also a big, big fan of analog crafting, and I think that making things with your hand is really the antidote to doomscrolling, which we're all doing right now. People need to be touching things with their hands. They need to be doing things.
And whenever you're doing it with a group of people and you're getting people together, it's really And it's really an act of resistance against anybody who's seeking to control us because there's a number of people who benefit from stealing our attention, and I'll tell you it's not us.
GILGER: Yeah, that's really interesting. So it sounds like you got a lot of very intense reactions from people when you started doing this on an organized basis.
TYGER: Shocking. I couldn't have imagined it. Whenever I started doing it, because whenever I did the free scraps, I saw that people were interested. And so after that, I was like, oh, well, it would be cool if people made a little page, you know, at the, at my booth.
I set up one table, it was 4 feet, and the very first people who came, it was these two girls who actually still come to Junk Journal Club today. Shout out Nina and Joy. They were the first ones and they had kind of said they were like, oh, I didn't know how much I needed this.
And I remember that sort of struck something in me because then all day people would come and it's, it's another one of those things. If you get it, you get it. A lot of people look and they just weren't interested, but if they got it, they got it. And people would say, this is the most creative thing I've ever done. There were people who got emotional.
And then I have different people who come to Junk Journal Club. And I think that they really see it as this very, this very safe place where they can come and they, they get to like unwind and do things with their hands with other creative people. And sometimes people do get emotional and they do, there's a release that they didn't know that they needed.
It's a way for them to be more present with the things in their lives that they collect, the things that they hold on to, and to even kind of think about why.
GILGER: Yeah. So Amber, you're over here doing your first page of a junk journal. What does this feel like? What do you, what do you like about it?
SINGER: I feel like I'm a paper hoarder. I have like a pile of wristbands from shows that I go to.
TYGER: Make a whole page!
SINGER: And I just like I always I hold on to receipts and I because I like journal and I always say that I'm sometimes I glue things into my journal and I just write around them, but I do end up just having a pile of trash because I'm sentimental and a bit of a hoarder and I can't throw away receipts from special dates.
TYGER: Yes!
GILGER: So it sounds like it's a good way to keep a record. And there's a nostalgia factor and a memory factor, but it also sounds like this is sort of therapeutic to people.
TYGER: I, I think that it is, and I think it's a way for people to hold on to these things and get this released. Yeah, I think it's just really good for people.
