Still Loving Bullet Journaling
Having fun with Feature Pages
Friends, I love my bullet journal! Almost six months after starting one, I still use it every day. I record my mood, add things to my ‘To Do’ list and tick them off, which is very satisfying. My life feels less helter-skelter than before I began.
Layout
I still haven’t found a favourite layout, but I may always work this way, being the type to easily get bored; experimenting with layouts keeps my interest. I tend towards ones that give as much room for Saturday and Sunday as the other days of the week, and I need decent space for tasks.
Month
Each month I’m ready for my new theme: Green & cacti for March, done! Fresh colours with eggs and bunnies for April, finito. My theme applies to the colour scheme of the pages as well as the style of decoration and mottos.
I embrace this challenge as each month comes up, searching Pinterest for ideas and inspiration before adding my own spin on a design
A month needs a front page to set the tone for my chosen theme and colour (my May one is header to this post). I list my goals (with tick boxes) and at month’s end I balance this with a list of my achievements.
Feature Pages
Sometimes I just want to draw in my journal. Perhaps I have projects running round my head making me jittery with their problems “don’t forget this,” “how to tackle that?”
These readily lend themselves to becoming lists and I relish the chance to create feature pages.
My house needs some reorganisation, so to keep myself on track with big and small projects, and the supplies I need to get the jobs done, I annotated a double page spread “Buy, Sell, Adjust”
It has space for the 3 lists, with tick boxes against them, plus it offered an opportunity to draw some 2-D furniture — do you like it?
The next time I felt the urge to draw some more, I browsed Pinterest to gather ideas for an ‘About Me’ page.
I won’t share its image here- it’s a hacker’s dream!
I had loads of fun filling the white space. This spread really tapped into mindfulness because, in compiling it, I was noting information which made up facets of my whole.
I started with my name written diagonally across the page — but instead of colouring this in with solid black, I used words that described me to fill the lines “wife, mother, star sign, height, age, hair colour, writer, reader, easygoing, music lover,” you get the idea.
Also on the page I mounted a baby picture of me, the date I was born, the date I got married. Now it was time to flesh it out with some lists:
- In a circle (to look like a record) I wrote some of my favourite songs & artists
- On the image of an open book I noted my top 10 authors
- The shape of an acorn held my family tree — grandparents, parents and siblings
- A purple crayon signified my favourite colour
- The outline of a house contained the places I’ve lived
- I drew a curl of film to list my top 4 movies
- Within a leaf-shape I named the pets I’ve owned
- I listed: dislikes, my allergy, hobbies and favourite things
It is me on a page! Very visual.
Putting that together was a very positive experience, which made me feel grounded, as if leaving something behind for my grandchildren. My friend Marie A. Rebelle got me thinking along these lines once I read she was making pages that recorded past memories so that her family would know/ understand things about her life when she was no longer around to answer questions.
I’m a voracious reader, so I record the books which I consume. You probably feel no surprise that I chose a shelf layout to keep track of when I’ve read or listened to books. I’ve stuck to my monthly colour schemes, which lends a nice ‘grouping’ effect. I pencil in the books in progress, and when I’ve finished reading, I write their titles down the spine of a coloured book on the shelf.
I get much more joy from journaling than I could have imagined.
Thinking up new ways to display information is a great way to flex my creativity and of course I get to buy new stationery — yippee! The mindfulness aspect has really surprised me how effective it is at calming me from the rigours of the day — and it’s way more useful than my failed (and ugly) attempts at knitting.
My final words are from Kelly Santana Banks a non-fiction writer and yogi:
My point is, if we are able to find space for simple tasks such as journaling, this will bring us peace and make our creative routine run much smoother.
Another Journaling post from Posy:
This post is linked to mmmMonday meme — why not see what others are sharing?
