I was going to do this for my Quick Takes last week, but I blanked on it at the time.
Full disclosure: There are as many ways to do a bullet journal as there are people who use bullet journals. This is how I have set mine up for one specific month, and it is not the only correct way to do it.)
I wanted to show people how I put my bullet journal together. I have only been doing it this particular way since the beginning of the year, so I am learning a little at a time about what works and what doesn’t work for me. My inspirations in this style of design are Amanda Rach Lee and Mary Beth of maryberrystudio. (I am not great at drawing or calligraphy, so I tend toward Mary Beth’s scrapbooking approach, but without the washi tape and stickers.)
(Also, I am an Amazon affiliate, so any Amazon links to products are affiliate links.)
The month doesn’t always start off on a Sunday, so sometimes you just need to have daily pages done ahead of time so that you can buy yourself time until you can do monthly layout things. I knew ahead of time how many pages I needed for monthly layout stuff, so I went ahead and drew a few pages for May 1st and 2nd. (The one shown is for May 2nd, and it has my Saturday chores on it. My weekday pages have the same layout, but my students’ names are present in the time slots where I work with them. The layout is adapted from one in this book.)
Here is what I start with for the calendar pages. It’s hard to see in this picture, but the pages have a dot grid and the dots are 5 mm apart.
I find an image I like on Unsplash.Com and print out a few full-page copies, depending on if I’m using something patterned or if it’s a regular picture where I need to print out accent pieces. This is the one I used for May. (It’s a picture of Iranian noble art taken by photographer Mohammad Ali Berenji. According to a fellow parishioner who spent a few years teaching in Iran before the Revolution and whose heart is still there, the architectural embellishments are called “muqarnas”.)
On the back of the images, I print some 5 mm graph paper from this site. (Homeschooling parents might want to look into this site as you can print out specialty graph paper for free. A fellow tutor loves the hexagonal paper for her organic chemistry notes.) I can’t cut a straight line to save my life, so this is really helpful to have as I can cut specific sizes based on the number of squares.
Once I have everything printed, I cut a few square accent pieces (the dot you see on the paper in the picture above is from that process), to see what color sharpie looks the best on it. Silver was the winner.
Once I have my accent pieces cut, I turn to the actual drawing portion. Using my bigger ruler, I draw the rectangles for what will be my calendar grid. I have learned the measurements I need in centimeters, so this is helpful. Once I have the outer borders drawn, I move to draw the horizontal lines for weeks. I then draw the vertical lines to divide everything into days (not shown).
Once my grid is drawn, I start placing the accent pieces with the month’s name and then a piece with an interesting quotation. While I am doing all the gluing down with the glue tape, I put the pieces on pages from old magazines or catalogs that I recycle. (It keeps my desk from getting covered in adhesive.)
Once the accent pieces are in place, I cut strips to serve as the labels for the days of the week. The one on the righthand calendar page tends to be a bit longer than the ones I use for daily pages.
Boom! Calendar layout is done!
The next part is my page of habit trackers. I use silicone stamping pieces that I peel off a sheet of plastic and place on transparent stamping blocks. (I need to get some blocks that have 5 mm squares, but these work well for the moment.) My inkpad is a cheap one from Michael’s. I am only tracking two things this month, so I make a large accent piece for the rest of the page. A lot of people have multiple special pages for mood trackers, the month’s playlist, quote pages, etc., but I generally stick to just the page of habit trackers for right now.
After this, I just have my daily pages to finish. I cut strips from the leftover picture that I used to make the accent piece for the tracker page and use those for the date labels. The strips are two squares tall, and I can write the date on them before cutting them to the length I need and glue taping them onto the page.
My finished daily page is here:
This a weekly layout page. The black things are my feeble attempts to make students’ names unreadable in MS Paint because I’m trying to avoid committing a FERPA violation.
Here’s the picture of almost everything I used:
Journal: Leuchtturm1917 Medium A5 Dotted Hardcover Notebook. There are less expensive ones that are just as good, such as this one. I like the dot grid, but some people really like having a square grid or just plain pages. You do you. The sticker on the front is from MoveOn.Org (in case anyone in my readership didn’t know that my politics are progressive). Again, you do you.
Pens: silver Sharpie, gold Sharpie, blue metallic Sharpie, and the Pilot Frixion black erasable gel pen that is my BFF. (The blue, red, and purple pens are also Pilot Frixion erasable gel pens. I just get them three at a time at my college’s bookstore because I don’t go through them as quickly as my black ones.)
Rulers: two cheap plastic ones from Office Depot
Stamps: black ink pad, silicone calendar stamp, and stamping blocks.
Miscellaneous: glue tape.
And finally, a picture of my supervisor:
If you have questions, please leave them in the comments and I may do a Quick Takes post with them.
