I have been coveting a new bullet journal since the spine on my current one starting breaking. I loved the idea of a new start–fresh pages and a whole new style of spreads, specifically those that look really time-consuming and difficult.

But, I’m only two-thirds through my current notebook and I didn’t feel I could just abandon it. To make up for the delayed chance to start a new bullet journal, I decided to start playing around with fancy spreads anyway. I figured it was like ‘practising’ for when I get a new notebook, whilst using up loads of pages. The bonus: they look amazing and weren’t that hard at all! They’re still not completely finished, and I’m not a good photographer, but I thought I would share:

For Christmas, I got a set of 60 5mm rolls of washi tape and some fancy Lyra pencils (if you’ve never had the chance to try these, they’re worth every penny). With these lovely new tools, a book of pretty fonts, and some Pinterest inspiration, I decided to try one of the double-page monthly spreads. You can see what I was doing before in my last bullet journal post.

I also tried a few different weekly spreads out, which I’m really enjoying! They’re definitely a lot more work and need a lot of forward thinking, but they make me happy.

I decided to attempt to track habits and my sleep schedule–I really like the sleep tracker, but I’m having trouble turning my ‘habits’ into habits… I got a bit carried away with my tracker pages by adding a mood tracker, a “places I’ve been in Europe” map, a reading tracker, a revision timetable, and “films in the watchbox” (If you want to watch loads of things but can never decide/always argue, creating a watchbox to hand the responsibility over to raffle-style probability could be what you need 😛 ). Some of the pages are unfinished, but I could potentially do more bullet journal posts in the future to show you them and future pages.

My favourites of these are the mood log and the map!! I did already mess up the map because I could have sworn we’ve been to Austria, but my parents have assured me we never crossed the border… I also drew it by eye, instead of tracing like many people do, so some of the countries are a little wonky. The black stars are places I’ve lived!

I’ve been considering doing a monthly bullet journal post now that I have all this fancy tape, but I know there are a lot of people doing BuJo posts who have better skills and cameras. So let me know! Should I stick with the occasional bullet journal post, or make it more of a thing?