A recap of what I did with my July layouts, what I liked and what I didn’t like.

Out of all the months so far that I’ve had my bullet journal (I’ve just made it past the one-year mark, woo hoo!) I think the busiest month has been this one. This was the first full month I’ve been working at my new job; back when I was in radio land I didn’t have too much diversity in my daily projects, and I didn’t need all that much room for the different sections in my layouts.

I had so much fun with the artwork for the monthly cover page — which is inspired by Gudetama. Generally I feel like July is a lazy month, so I think the drawing got the point across. Next time I’ll be sure to use marker instead of gel pens so that I’m not getting too many lines on the page. (That, and also gel pens runs when you spill water on that…which I’ll talk a bit more about below.)

I supplemented my decorating with stickers by Paperkumaco and some old sticker sheets Jon bought me a few months ago at Indigo.

In more recent months I’d been drawing full calendars to see what I was doing daily, but I wanted to change it up a bit and go back to an unstructured sort of list format. I find it messy, so I don’t think I’ll be doing that again for a while.

One of my biggest lessons learned: stick with the ballpoint pens. I accidentally spilled water on my bullet journal and everything I’d drawn with gel pens totally ran. It happens, but it’s not a good look during the spill…and after it, too.

Visually my favourite week would have to be July 9 to July 15. There are plenty of nice, clean lines supplemented by the colour provided by my daily “to-do” items in each box. Saturday and Sunday were a little small, but otherwise the rest of the layout is good. I was also able to cram a lot of information into this layout, except during the weekend.

While I liked the colour of the July portion for the week of July 16 to 22, I didn’t like this layout because I didn’t have enough room to write all of my tasks out. I’ll be sure to avoid smaller boxes next time. My days tend to be quite busy so little boxes aren’t reasonable to use in my designs.

I’m looking forward to showing you my August layouts! Stay tuned!