With September jumping out at me from nowhere, I was a little behind on getting my bullet journal spread together for September (only by 2 days!). But I am really pleased with this month.
I learned a lot from my August spread. Firstly, I’ve swapped out a tracker, replacing the one for my medications with one for tracking when I finish work on time. It’s a much better thing to track because it doesn’t happen often enough, so this will help encourage me.
Also in August I realised that I did want to use my bujo for work and personal, which meant I needed a bit more room for the weekly spreads, so I’ve changed that up, too.
Here in September marks the beginning of Spring for us in the Southern Hemisphere, so I decided I wanted to do a Secret Garden themed spread for the month, with lots of spring flowers and butterflies. There’s a nice little surprise at the start of this spread, which is best shown in video… so here’s the tiktok I made showing everything.
Title pages
The quote on the left is from the book The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. For me it was about how spring is a time for new growth, and with new growth comes all sorts of possibilities and miracles.
Then on the right… I’m SO pleased with this. I recently purchased some SVG files from Bella CreativaDesigns on Etsy for things like junk journals and beautiful boxes and what not. In one of those files were these sweet windows, so I decided to make them so it was like opening a window to a spring garden. I used some decorative paper for the ‘garden’ and added a butterfly sticker and some ivy. I just really like it 🙂
Swatches and calendar
One of the other things I learned from my first spread in August was that I wasn’t very good at keeping track of the colours I used, which meant I had mis-matched colours and it really bothered me. I also knew I wouldn’t have space on my daily gratitude spread for the colour key, so instead I made a swatches page to help me keep track.
Again, the pocket I made was part of the files from Bella Creativa, and I used another part of the garden paper from the window spread to decorate the pocket. I also tried my hand at using inks to age the pocket a bit… turned out ok. It’s not very obvious in the pictures.
I also did a month page, really only because I had the spare page. I don’t use it a lot, but it didn’t take long to make. Although I clearly made mistakes lol But it’s ok.
Daily mood & gratitude
This is hands down my favourite my favourite spread.
In the main part of my bujo is a mood a day tracker. For August it looked like this:
And that’s all well and good… but I’m such an all over the place, I rarely feel one emotion at a time, let alone over the course of a day. So whilst this is a good start, I wanted to do something a bit more meaningful on a monthly basis.
In addition, in August I had a gratitude page, where each day I would write down something I was grateful. This ended up being really important, because some days it was difficult, it and forced me to stop and really think about how fortunate I am. So I wanted to continue doing that (the spread is a bit too personal to share here, sorry, but it looks nice now that it’s complete!).
I decided to combine the two ideas into one ‘daily mood & gratitude’ spread so that I could see how I was feeling at the same time I was finding something to be grateful for. I wanted to be able to express multiple moods, so in fitting with the spring theme I decided to have some butterfly images that I would colour in. The colours of the butterflies would match my moods that day, and there were enough parts of the butterfly to have lots of moods! You can already see 3 days completed in the pics above.
This was also where that swatches page comes in handy, because the card in that pocket says the different colours for the different moods. Once I’ve coloured the butterfly, I write around it the thing I’m grateful for. It’s a little squishy and I need to be succinct, but that’s good for me anyway 😀
Trackers
What’s a new month without new trackers?
I was quite happy with how the trackers worked last month so just did the same again, but swapped out one tracker.
The other side is this month’s special tracker. Last month was Blaugust posts, this month, being the start of Spring, I wanted to focus on cleaning and getting the house back in order. I’m terrible about cleaning so am hoping this will help encourage me to be a bit better about it. There’s already a couple of things I’d probably change about this, but it will be fine for this month, and depending on how it goes, it will likely stick around for future spreaders, too.
Weekly spreads
Lastly we have 5 week-spreads for the months….
Each week consists of 4 individual pages, with the middle 2 pages (that are back to back) being trimmed into what’s called ‘Dutch Doors’. This allowed me to have much bigger sections for each day so that I could use this for work as well as personal. I am really happy with how these came out. They took a long time to make, but were definitely worth it, and something I’ll continue to do in future. I got the inspiration for this from a spread I saw online (unfortunately no idea whose it was, as the page I saw it on didn’t attribute the work to the owner). I really liked having the menu in the margin of each week as it will help make shopping a bit easier.
Each week has its own washi tape design and colours, and then I clearly went to town with all the butterflies hehe. But I really like it. They make me smile, and this is just for me anyway so that’s all it needs to do, right?
So that’s it! September all blocked out. I actually already have ideas in mind for October. I know the theme, and I’ve thought of a really cool idea for the ‘daily mood & gratitude’. I’m not too sure what I’ll do for the extra spread for that month… any suggestions for things you think I should include in here?
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