March is another attempt at minimal decoration for my bullet journal spreads. And they look especially minimal here before the month had started. My quote for this month is "Sometimes that Light at the end of the tunnel is a train."

If you're interested in seeing my February and March setups in more detail, then this video is for you. I go through my thought process behind some of the planner spreads, and explain what alllll the tiny circles are in the picture above. 

To start the new year off, I decided to go with a celestial theme. I used Tombows and watercolor markers to create the cloudy backgrounds, and used stickers from a Happy Planner sticker book called "Sophisticated Stargazer" as added decoration. My new word for 2026 is "Light" and the quote for the month is "Routines give a Lightness to heavy problems." After a hectic holiday season, I was very ready to start the year getting back to the routines and rhythms of my daily life.

Enjoy some simple, minimal planning that I made for my November spreads. I just used a black pen and some watercolor markers in my Tiefossi dot grid journal.

It' s the same story every October. It's my favorite month, my favorite time of year, and there are so many things that I want to do and make and experience. Which means that, historically, my October spreads never get finished. And this year was no exception.

My September theme started with a quote (as it so often does).  Every year I have a "word of the year" and for 2025 that word is Still. Every month, I have a quote in my journal that incorporates my word of the year. The quote I chose for September is:
"Serenity is knowing that even your worst shot is still pretty good."


This one really spoke to me because one of my goals for the year was to release a new pattern on September 1. While I did technically do this, (Yay! My tombstone pattern expansion pack is now available!) I did not technically do everything that I wanted to in order to prep for launching this pattern. Ideally, I would’ve had more examples sewn up and more photos and more videos ready to share before releasing it. But nothing’s perfect, I can’t let perfect be the enemy of good or whatever that saying is. And I’m feeling that although this pattern release is not everything that I wanted it to be, it is, in fact, "pretty good" enough.


So long story short, that is why I chose this quote for September. But as soon as I settled on the quote and began to think about how to incorporate it into a theme, I realized that I cannot read the word "serenity" without thinking about the movie Serenity and the TV show Firefly. If you know, you know.

My goal for my August bullet journal layouts was to do them all in one sitting. I created them while traveling out of the country, and wanted to keep them low key. So, simple was the name of the game, and that included limiting the number of pens I used too. I originally tried to only pick one marker color. But ended up letting myself use two markers, as well as my black pen.
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I've been experimenting lately with my monthly cover pages. I've realized that a purely decorative spread is one that I don't turn back to very often, which is a shame when I put a lot of artistic effort into it. So this moth, I decided to spread out the "cover spread" pages to ensure that my decorations are incorporated into my more useful spreads. Above, you can see that my beachy July ocean spread also has my aims page in the water, which is something that I look back at often throughout the month.
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