Setting up my Bullet Journal for May: Geum flower theme

It’s the 1st of May and yesterday I finished creating my main spreads for the month in my bullet journal. Again, I decided to take inspiration from our garden and spent some time sitting with a coffee in the sunshine contemplating and idea creating. There’s lots of shades of green outside and we have a plethora of tulips in full bloom, but the flowers which caught my eye the most were the pretty and delicate geums. We have two varieties, one a semi double-headed variety in bright red called Mrs J Bradshaw and the other, a pretty orange called Totally Tangerine. I took photos of both with my new Samsung phone and was impressed with the quality of the camera. I loved the different shades of the second and decided to have a go at sketching a flower stem for my front cover. From there, I decided to create more simple flowers to use for my other pages. I hope you like my layouts and feel inspired to have a go at a floral theme in the future.

Front cover

Using the above photograph to help me, I sketched out the stem and flower head and added a bud and another stem. It took me a long while to get the sizing right as I needed the flower to be the focal point. I found drawing the leaves to be the most difficult bit and I’m not entirely happy with them but I eventually left them alone after erasing a few times too many! With the sketching complete, I inked in the flower using a 0.2 Pigma Micron in black. I debated whether to use watercolour paint or pencils to add the colour and in the end, I trialled both by photocopying the image onto watercolour paper and thick printer paper. The only problem was, printer ink isn’t waterproof like my Pigma pen ink so it bled into the orange watercolour paint – I thought it was such a good idea too!

Calendar pages / Month at a glance

The calendar layout is my usual 6×6 dot boxes drawn using a Pigma Micron in 03 with the numbers done using a Pilot V5 Hi-Techpoint 0.5 pen in black. The brush letter May was created using a mid-green Faber-Castell Pitt Artist brush pen which I found easier to use than the Tombow ABT for this size lettering. I have no idea where I got the washi tape from but it was a great purchase as it goes with just about everything!

For the flowers, I changed to a face on view of the heads which was much simpler to draw in a larger number to fill the spaces around the calendar. My only real disappointment with these pages was due to way the spine was glued as it created an ugly crease on my title spread which spoiled the look somewhat. So far I’ve been happy with my dot grid notebook from Notebook Therapy but just a few pages do not lay flat without super annoying creasing.

Fitness – Activity Tracker

Last month, I drew up a spread which documented the kinds of workouts I was doing each day. I mentioned then, that in the future I might like to record my workout times so I can see how many active minutes I’m cramming in each day. I did a quick search on Google and discovered some simple, colourful and helpful spreads on this blog. I adapted one of them by making a double page layout with my own exercise types and a larger scale for the minutes of exercise (in April, my highest total was 148 minutes in one day but I’m going to add a plus sign on the end if I go over 130). The extra space also meant that I could include a motivational saying at the bottom. Although this one is quite American in its choice of words (the ‘cute’ bit), it’s particularly pertinent as, by the time I’ve finished a gym session or a cardio class, my face is all red and sweaty and my hair has become a frizzy mess – not a good look!

By the end of the month, I’ll be able to see how I spent my active time in a bright and colourful visual representation of all of my workouts. I’ll also be able to see how regularly I’m doing each form of exercise.

Final words…

That’s all of my initial spreads for the month of May – just 3 at the moment but I’m contemplated adding a weekly food diary so I can assess my eating as well as how active I’ve been each day. This will probably be just a very simple record of breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks so it’s not really something to share.

I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing my pages for May. I’m looking forward to seeing other Bujo themes and have already watched quite a few plan with me videos on YouTube (I like to cast them to the TV screen in our living room so that I get a nice big view). Let me know in the comments if you have any special plans for this month or if you are working on something particular – I love to hear what everyone is up to!