Setting up my bullet journal for May: Floral theme

Hi everyone, I hope you’re all doing okay. For this month in my bullet journal, I took inspiration from our garden and decided to do a floral theme – I know it’s a popular / common theme but hopefully my take on it is a little bit different. There are so many stunningly delicate flowers popping out right now and quite a few of them in one of our beds have been a complete surprise because they’ve self seeded from next door’s hanging baskets that they had up last year (no idea how this has happened as their baskets are on the other side of a six foot fence). The result is some wonderfully thick clumps of viola and pansies in an array of gorgeous Spring colours. Not a bad display for a cost of £0.00! I hope you enjoy looking at my spreads for May and I wonder if they might prompt you to do a little watercolouring in your bullet journal sometime soon?

The front cover

To enable me to include lots of different flowers and leaves, I decided to try out a watercolour wreath for my cover page. I used my Helix circle drawing tool to create the basic shape and then lightly sketched out the flowers and leaves. Most are based on real florals including cherry blossom (which is overhanging our garden from next doors tree), forget-me-not (which we often see on woodland walks) and the little patches of bedding plants, but I did use a little artistic license in places when it came to the leave shapes and colours. When I was happy with the basic design, I used a 003 Pigma Micron to ink them in. The ink is waterproof so it works great with watercolour.

I had great fun mixing different shades of watercolour and was glad of my three plastic mixing palettes. I used a size 0 brush for most of the larger areas and a teeny tiny 3/0 brush for the little berries and the thin stems. After everything was dry, I added some little dots of gold here and there to give the piece a bit of shimmer – it probably doesn’t show up well on the camera but IRL, it looks good! In the past, I’ve used watercolour paper to create a design to paint and then photocopied the finished piece but the colours are never the same on the printed image so I’m pleased I painted straight into my bullet journal.

The Monthly Calendar

This is my usual calendar set up – it’s just the right size for noting appointments and events so I never see the need to change it. There are lots of different cute colour combos in the little violas and pansies so I decided to have a go a painting some of them. I spent hours doing the different florals, mixing the paint to get shades just like the real flowers and adding the little lines from the centre. There was lots of precision involved but I’m really pleased with how they turned out. The 160gsm paper means that the paint doesn’t bleed through but it’s not as smooth to work on as watercolour paper. My next BuJo has the same thickness of paper so I’ll definitely be doing some more painting in the future.

2 lines a day Gratitude Log

I’ve really enjoyed filling in my gratitude log each evening for the last two months and it has become very much a part of my routine. This is the same set up as before with the addition of some watercolour behind the heading. I used the wet into wet technique so the previous and next page have gone a bit wrinkly but I’m pleased with how it turned out so I don’t mind too much!

For my daily entries, I include simple things such as the supermarket having my favourite sandwiches in stock for our picnic, paracetamol to ease my foot pain and a new yoga sequence on YouTube to try. There are so many benefits of practising gratitude, one of which is increased optimism so I highly recommend it.

Yoga session tracker

I’ve been doing yoga for well over a year now. I started attending a class but it was quickly cancelled due to COVID-19 so I now do sequences from my favourite YouTube Channel Yoga with Lin and Leo. I miss the chance to have input from the teacher and I’m looking forward to the chance to interact with others in a class but I’ll definitely continue to use the channel to practise regularly at home. This line a day tracker allows me to record my sessions in brief and identify my rest days. Hopefully, some day soon, I’ll be able to write down some face-to-face classes!

May Memories

This is another spread I’ve been doing for a few months now. It’s a place to record anything of note that happened such as a wildlife spot, lunch with a friend, interesting purchases, places visited etc. I’ve left the décor minimal so I’ve got plenty of room to write. Before photographing, I wrote a memory from yesterday so that you can see what my entries look like.

That’s all of my initial spreads for this month. As I’ve said before, I don’t draw up weekly plans anymore as I just end up wasting space if there’s not much going on that day or I end up filling days with to do lists of things that really don’t need to be done on a specific day.

Final words…

I hope you’ve enjoyed having a sneak peek at my spreads for May even if I shared them a little later than planned. Don’t forget to let me know in the comments what theme you’ve chosen this time and if you’ve shared your pages on your blog, I will be sure to check them out. Hopefully next month I’ll find the time to get cracking a little earlier and the lighting will be more conducive to taking photos (the April showers have saved themselves up until the final week of April and have then continued on into the first week of May).

Happy bullet journalling,