It’s pretty obvious I took a year off – I’m going to address that in another post. However, to summarize where I’ve been and why – I wasn’t very inspired and I was working a lot. I still was using my bullet journal but I was too stressed out to sit down and reflect on anything – let alone a hobby. Then the Coronavirus happened and I just didn’t use my bullet journal for a few months. Well, it’s July. In Spain, things are turning around enough that I can get out and breathe. I’m so glad to have re-kindled my inspiration.
So anyways – I wanted to update on some things I’ve been doing with my bullet journal and in particular my fun, festive July setup. So here we go.
The Inspiration
To start, I need to directly credit two fantastic creators – Nicole Josephine and Cynthia Bujo. Nicole Josephine has really inspired the font choices – She actually sells some sticker sheets on her Etsy shop. I think she’s an incredible artist and I love her fun layouts for her bullet journal.
The actual theme came from Cynthia Bujo – I love how she puts her spreads together. She uses elements of watercolor and collage and I’m here for it. So thank you ladies for your amazing talent. It’s inspiring to me.
The cover pages
I obviously took most of the layout inspiration directly from Cynthia Bujo. I knew I wanted something bright and summery. My first thought was actually citrus inspiration but for some reason, I’m holding off on making a lemon spread. Maybe because I want to save it for a birthday month in the future – lemons are my favorite fruit. I knew that in August – I want to do something a little bit different since I’ll be traveling a bit within Spain.
For the quote page I wanted something silly and summery. A couple of months ago I watched Hairspray the movie for the first time in ages and I remembered the song “Without love” and the quote for July was right there.
The Month at a Glance
This is a pretty standard month at a glance page made more exciting to me by the introduction of stamps. I ordered these stamps for 19 Euros off of Amazon and I already know I’m going to get a ton of use out of them. Personally, I have never liked the look of my handwritten numbers so I’m pretty excited to have an alternative.
The Trackers
I love tracking my habits and moods. I switched to individual habit trackers a year and a half ago and haven’t looked back.
And for the mood tracker – I had to go with a pineapple. I mean – come on. It’s adorable. One way I’m a bit different than a lot of people is that I prefer to be more specific with my general moods than most people. Lots of people in the bullet journal community have a sliding scale from a smile to a frown – not unlike what you see when you go into the hospital. For me, I need to be more specific. And to stay more or less true to a pineapple – I only used the pinks, browns and yellows to mark my moods.
The New Pages
This is the first month ever that I made a page to track all the expenses I share with my boyfriend. Since we moved in together, I want to make sure everything is squared off. This is where we are going to write down all of our shared expenses so we can settle up at the end of the month.
One gamble my boyfriend and I made about mid-way through quarantine was to book flights to Mallorca. Round trip per person was less than 50 Euros. We decided if we could capitalize on those prices – we would gamble. We still aren’t completely sure what’s going to happen but I wanted a page to plan just in case we can!
I made the outline of Mallorca by finding a picture of the outline, turning the brightness all the way up on my phone and tracing it onto a piece of paper with a pencil. I think it ended up looking pretty adorable! I added the washi tape just as an accent – the map is actually glued down. I still need to decide how I want to use the rest of this page – for memory journaling or for planning. I’ll update you at the end of the month.
The Weekly Layout
I wanted my weekly pages to be relatively flexible. I actually have the most to do on Saturdays and Sundays because I teach online but they are only one line in the bullet journal. The rest of the week, I usually do most of the tasks, errands and chores which I mark down. I use all my planners as daily to-do lists or reminders of when I did larger tasks. While I do pre-plan for major things, day to day things are written down as I think of them.
To distinguish the days from each other, I sort of use washi tape as borders. I wanted to keep the fun and decorative elements throughout the spread and overall, I love the way this week turned out. I may modify slightly throughout the month based on how much I have going on at different times.
The tools
This month I started by using a whole bunch of different colors. I knew I wanted yellow, pink, green and orange. I also needed a white and brown to make the patterns on top of the pineapples. I used a combination of Tombow Dual Brush pens, Crayola Supertip Markers and Mildliners for the colors. I also have been using a simple black .4 Staedtler pigment liner for the writing and a white Gelly Roll pen to accent the pineapples.
In this month, I wanted to incorporate more black and white through washi tape. I found three types of graphic black and white ones from my collection and went to town. I also mentioned before my new pack of stamps that I got. Instead of using them with a stamp pad, I just color them over with black Tombow pen and then stamp them.
The last tools I needed were directly related to how many times I screwed up all the spreads. I used paper from an old bullet journal (I usually end up with a few blank pages towards the end) and then glued it in using the Milan glue tape. You can see this all over the place on the Mood tracker page. I didn’t like how I wrote certain words so I just re-did them with new paper and stuck them in.
So there you have it – that’s my July Bullet journal all ready to go! I hope you are ready for tons more content coming. I’m going to try to get back on the writing horse more consistently. Let me know what your favorite summer themes are below!
The Minimalist Abroad 