For this month, I took inspiration from seasonal eating and chose something we always enjoying trying lots of varieties of at this time of year: squashes! There are butternut squashes in the UK supermarkets pretty much all year round but once late September arrives, the mixed squashes begin to appear in the veg aisle, followed by huge pumpkins for Halloween, adding lots of autumnal colour and different shapes and sizes – some smooth and others with knobbly bits. This autumn, so far, we’ve sampled acorn, carnival, red kuri and sweet dumpling and we have two small delicata squashes lined up for this week. Each has its own unique flavour, some sweeter than others, and recommended uses include for soups, mash, risottos, tray bakes and stews.
For this month’s spreads I used my Tombow brush pens, Pigma microns and white gel pen for the calendar, Tombow and Micron pens for the finance spread, a pencil for sketching all of the squashes and my watercolour paints to create the front cover. I used a photograph I found online to help me sketch out the cover image.
Front cover
For the front cover, I took a slightly less that A5 piece of smooth watercolour paper (hot pressed) and sketched the squashes based on the photograph. I then mixed my Winsor & Newton Cotmon watercolours to create the different shades I needed. I used the wet on dry technique and made sure that I worked in a way that meant that all adjacent squashes were left for dry before painting the next one. Rather than sticking in the watercolour paper, I scanned the image and added the November title before printing it off and gluing it onto the page. Watercolour paper is really thick and would make my notebook too bulky.
Calendar pages
I used the usual 6×6 dot grid for my calendar, added the title using the bullet end of a brown Tombow and then sketched out lots of squashes using images that I found online. I then coloured them in using Tombows and Crayola supertips before outlining using a 0.1 nib Unipin fineliner. I also used a Gelly roll pen in 0.5 to add a few highlights. I filled in the spaces by adding leaves using the black pen again. I’m pretty pleased with how this page turned out but I wish I hadn’t drawn lines of the butternut squash – once it done, it’s done though!
Finances
I’ve been tracking my finances since August and it takes just a few minutes each week to update my tracker. I might identify outgoings by category this month e.g. clothing, books, hobbies, beauty products etc, rather than recording exactly what I bought. By the end of the month, this will be absolutely full!
Weekly plan 1
I’ve been trying out different weekly layouts for a while now and still haven’t decided which I prefer. This time I opted for vertical boxes with a little munchkin squash at the bottom. When I’m working at the university I need much more space to record events whereas on other days, I only need space for a few lines as all of my to-dos go in my running task list. I wanted to blur out the university information for privacy reasons and I found a great explanation online which was quick and easy! I love learning how to do new things on the computer.
Final words…
I hope you’ve enjoyed looking at my spreads for this month. Again, I’m late getting them finished but I had lots of life admin stuff to do last week and we were out all day on Halloween as it was my husband’s birthday (no getting dressed up or entertaining trick or treaters for us!). Also, the lighting has been pretty rubbish, so I’ve struggled to get decent photos taken of the pages. I should start making plans for December’s spreads now as during the month itself I’ll be busy doing journalling and photographs in the form of a December Daily album.
Keeping it creative 