December 2018 Bullet Journal Setup and New Bullet Journal

My new bullet journal - Exceed brand from Wal-Mart

I'm a little late showing you my bullet journal setup for December, but we were on vacation during the first week and I tweaked a few things the second week. So I'm finally ready to show you what's currently working for me in my bullet journal.

First of all, I needed a new notebook this month. It's a little odd to switch notebooks in December, but hopefully somewhere down the road I'll switch at a more normal month.

I do like the Michaels Artist Loft notebooks, but I saw this yellow Exceed notebook at Wal-Mart and just had to try it. I love yellow, but I don't want to have to pay $20 for a yellow bullet journal. (Michaels doesn't carry their notebooks in yellow.)

I personalized the outside with a vinyl monogram an online friend made for me.

I'm also carrying my bullet journal without the Create 365 organizer I've been carting around that holds all of my pens and markers. I like being able to just throw this in my purse and not have another handle to hold onto. So far, the elastic loop is holding up well having it double as a pen holder (see the picture above). My last Artist Loft notebook elastic snapped pretty fast when I tried this.

New sleep log

This notebook is a slightly different size than what I was using, so my old sleep log layout wouldn't work. There aren't enough spaces horizontally to fit every hour of the day, as well as the date and day. (There are only 24 spaces across.) So I decided to track the number of hours I sleep, rather than the actual hours. It works for this notebook, although I have to admit that I like the old layout better.

I'm trying an entirely new layout for my weeklies. Since I'm trying to be more mindful of my health, I decided to track everything I eat in a day. I can't eat a lot at one sitting, so I tend to eat smaller meals - and more than three a day. This gives me space to record six meals/snacks. It has been working perfectly for me these last two weeks.

I love Dutch doors for my dailies, and I really love having tabs to make it easier to turn the pages.

I used some Christmas car/truck accents from a $5 Hot Buy paper pad from Michaels. The washi tape is from Dollar Tree, if I remember correctly. It's been awhile since I bought it.

After all of my dailies, I have space to record my daily workouts. I'm not into working out like some people, so this amount of space is perfect for what I need.

The rest of the elements (to-do list, menu and small calendar) are carry-overs from previous weekly layouts that I liked.

So far, I'm enjoying this notebook. The pages are more cream than white, and I thought that would bother me. But since my preferred pen (Uni-Ball Signo 207) doesn't stay wet for any length of time, it's a good trade-off in my mind. I used to have to add blotting pages in my Artist Loft book every time I wrote something and then had to turn the page within a minute or so.

I'm also enjoying the dot grid pages rather than the graph-lined pages I've been using. I'll probably be sticking with dot grid from now on. I like how the dots give me enough structure to design my pages and write straight, but they don't get in the way visually.

I'm already having difficulty drawing my lines at the spine of the book, so we'll see if that gets worse or stays about the same. If it stays the same, it won't be a dealbreaker. If it gets worse, it will be.

I hope you've enjoyed the peek into my new bullet journal!

An Altered Composition Book with Tabs

Yes, I've been on a papercrafting kick lately. I've never outgrown my childhood love of paper, and I suspect I never will. So let me share my latest variation on the composition-notebook-turned-pretty-journal: tabbed sections.

Front cover

I decided to make myself a pretty notebook, and I chose to use a graph-lined composition notebook. I found this one at a thrift store for $0.40. Someone had used three pages out of it, but it was a very nice quality, so I just carefully removed the used pages and continued on.

After doing several tabbed notebooks, I came up with a formula. What can I say? I like to reduce things to formulas and patterns. It's just the way my mind works. It also frees me to narrow my creative focus to the little details that make the difference for me.

So I started out with three sheets of floral paper, two sheets of polka dot paper, four sheets of cardstock and a Spellbinders tab die.

These papers came from Hobby Lobby. I don't have a Hobby Lobby store near me, but I like to support them every chance I get. So I stopped in while I was on vacation recently. I couldn't resist these gorgeous papers, especially at $0.25 for a 12x12" sheet!

There are 80 sheets in the composition notebook I used. Since I created four dividers, that means each section has 20 sheets (including the divider page). And since I removed three sheets, I just took those out of the page count of the outermost sections.

I created the front cover (shown above) with one of the sheets of the floral paper, saving the scraps for dividers.

Back cover

 I accented the gorgeous floral with a polka dot paper on the back and wrapped it around to the front. This took most of one sheet, but there were scraps that I saved to use on the divider pages (and for the tabs).

Inside front cover and first divider

This paper doesn't need any more decoration, at least for me. So I simply cut a second sheet of the floral paper to fit inside the front cover and used the excess for part of the first divider page. It gives it a seamless look, and I really like this method. To fill in the rest of the divider page, I used a scrap of the polka dot paper.

A note on the tabs: This paper is lightweight, so the tabs needed some reinforcement. I backed them with cardstock before attaching them to the page, and it worked perfectly.

Second divider

This is the next divider page. I used scraps from the floral pages and filled in with the extra polka dot sheet (as well as polka dot scraps).

Third divider

I accented the pages with some homemade paper lace. I was so excited to find this Martha Stewart lace border punch at a thrift store recently! It was one of my all-time favorites from the last time I was into papercrafting.

Fourth divider

That's the last of the divider pages.

Inside back cover

I used floral paper on the inside of the back cover. I actually did this before the divider pages so I could use up all the scraps of the floral paper on the dividers. It worked well because I didn't have many scraps at all.

And that's it! I really, really love this notebook. I'm currently using it to sketch out my craft ideas. Graph paper comes in so handy for things like that, and I like that I can hang onto all of my ideas in one book to refer back to.

Homeschool Bullet Journals, Part 3

Last week I showed you the beginnings of my son's homeschool bullet journal for this year. This week I'll show you the beginnings of my daughter's.

I let her choose a washi tape that coordinated with the journal color she chose. From there, I picked the marker color and coordinating washi tapes. I still took a minimalist approach to the decorating, but she can fancy it up if she wants to.

I started with the same printable year sticker for the front cover so we can keep track of the days she's done schoolwork.

My daughter turned 13 this year. She has been planning her birthday party on my Pinterest account for a long time now. I created a spread where she could choose her favorite ideas so we could narrow them down.

Here is her book list. I'm sure we'll need several of these spreads. My kids each check out about ten books every time we visit the library, which we try to do every two weeks.

And here is one of her "grade sheets". Hers are just slightly fancier with the addition of gold washi tape.

And there you have it - simple, but effective. At some point, I'll have to update you on how they've worked for us now that we've been using them for a few months.