Turning Towards the Sun

As I was planning for the end of summer, thinking about August kept bringing up images of the sun. So that’s what I went with in my bujo spreads this month.

Cover

Just the sun. I had this idea for a scribbly sun, and put it on a page by itself. It’s simple and somehow comforting. I used a pale yellow marker to cover the right-hand page. I like the balance of these two pages.

Calendar

Even at night, the sun is still out in space somewhere, and so are all its star friends. I love the shift from the cover spread to the calendar, day to night. I guess I didn’t think I could last a whole month with only yellow to look at :O)

It doesn’t jump out in the picture, but I wrote August 2022 in gold on the bottom right corner. The empty white portion of the calendar, which doesn’t have any dates, is intended for a quote, or maybe goals.

Projects

I went back to contrasting backgrounds, creating a yellow band across the bottom of the spread for my habit trackers, and inviting the scribbly sun back in. This is what the spread looked like before I filled in all my tasks for the month.

Mistakes

So, there’s something I want to share. When I’m setting up my bujo spreads, I make mistakes all the time. In order to minimize their impact, I lay everything out in pencil before inking anything. I erase a lot. Inked mistakes still happen.

Below is my calendar spread before photo editing. The line across Thursdays (in a different shade of white) is white-out tape covering a line drawn in the wrong place. You can also see this in the edited photo above, it’s just not as obvious.

I edit my photos?! A bit, yes. Mostly to make the whites brighter and blur out private info and add my name to the photo. It’s amazing how much better the photos look with a little tweaking. 

I say all this to make it clear that I put some effort into presenting my bullet journal. This is above and beyond the effort of setting it up, which is all most people need or care to do.

Real Life

And then there’s real life. I find a lot of pleasure in doodling in my bujo and organizing myself. I probably spend more time on it than I should. Even when I’m efficient, it takes a whole day to set up my month, not including the time I spend brainstorming before hand. But I do have limits. These past two months I decided to photograph my spreads before filling them in, because it makes editing the photos so much easier. (Blurring out personal information is fiddly.)

This month, after taking my pictures, I added gold to the sun drawings. They look better now. But I’m showing you the pre-gold photos because I don’t want to take the time to reshoot and re-edit.

I love sharing my bujo, but it’s not a priority. Right now, getting things ready for school in the fall is more important than posting images online. The realities of life. I’m setting up finances for my daughter to study abroad, getting instruments cleaned for all the bands my son will be playing in, and trying to get to Target for school supplies before they’re cleaned out. (And yes, by the time school actually starts, Target only has a few packs of loose-leaf paper and some off-brand crayons left. Notebooks, folders and favored writing instruments are nowhere to be found.)

Signing Off

Let me know if you’d like to see the filled out versions of my August spreads, and I’ll set aside a different week to do that :o) In the meantime, I hope you are valuing your time, celebrating your own unique talents, and doing the things that make you happy. I’ll leave you with a quote that I think about all the time…

“Try not to compare your insides to other people’s outsides.”

Anne Lamott

I rewatched her TED Talk to make sure I got this quote right, and can’t resist linking it. This woman has wisdom, and if you’re in need of a laugh or a cry, you can do both at the same time while listening to the 12 truths Anne Lamott learned from life and writing.