My Bullet Journal: Oopsies & Reinvented Pages

This is the fourth in a series of posts about My Bullet Journal Journey. I’ve sequenced the posts so that they chronicle my journey and are step-by-step guides for those of you considering starting your own. 

• #1 – My Bullet Journal: Taking the Plunge (materials)
• #2 – How to Get Started (terms and basic set up)
• #3 – My Collections
• #4 – Oopsies & Reinvented Pages

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I’ve been working at bullet journaling for five months now. It is a journey of self-discovery and a learning process. I started mid-January and decided to delay my posts until I had enough content and time to share them how I really wanted them done.

I am not an artist. I grip my writing utensils tightly and I write heavily. Lightness on a page is hard for me. It requires retraining your entire fine motor skills and muscle memory. It also requires patience, which I’m not always the best at it. Sometimes it means lots of erasure or just going straight to the White Out. I’m also not always the best at generating or creating a fresh idea, so sometimes I start with an inspirational find and later on think of ways to tweak what I’ve put on the page and make it more creative and appealing.

Oopsies! & Reinvented Pages

I started a Wish List page for larger, perhaps pricey, items. When I started this page I kept it a simple list. I could only think of one item that I could put down, and the page stayed this way for a few months.

Until I found something new to add to brighten the plain page. I love the dandelion blowing in the wind I have seen on a few others’ pages, so I decided to incorporate it on my Wish List. The dandelion is whimsical and dreamy…like my wish list. 🙂

My Mood Tracker is also something I improved. Originally I started with only 5 moods: Happy, Sad, Mad, Stressed, and Bleh. I used these through all of January.

When I showed my yearbook students my Mood Tracker (because they are also doing their own bullet journals), they didn’t like that I had a bunch of bleh days. In fact, they thought I should add another mood: Frustrated. Most of them are former students I have taught or current students, so they know me well and they understood I needed to add this mood to my list.

So I did. After reflecting on my moods I allotted myself, I realize next year I am going to make a better effort up front to include the variety of moods to help me better categorize and track my mood. Bleh doesn’t please me as an every day mood. Perhaps content?

My movie tracker started out even worse than my Wish List. It was a very minimalist list. And I hated that. It was so boring.

I did a little research, found some other examples out there and reinvented this page. It took a lot of White Out. As a perfectionist, that drives me crazy, but I would rather have the page the best way I can make it than worry about correcting something to redo or get rid of entirely.

 I made a grievous mistake one day while setting up my weeklies. Somehow I got off on the dates and messed up an entire page. You can see on the front of the page I corrected it by freehand, but the backside shows the tell-tale mistake. Originally I had Saturday and Sunday as the 3rd and the 4th, when in reality it was the 4th and the 5th. You can still see the 3 and 4 on the underside when the light hits it just right.

After my students presented two of their collections shortly before leaving for spring break, they gave me a handful of ideas. One of those was a travel destinations spread. My student had a simple list with related icons on a page (half-spread). Because I always investigate before I start a new spread, searching for inspiration, I came across a very professional spread I tried to duplicate. I’m not as good of an artist, and I definitely have a thing or seven to learn about proper shading and such (although I was told white helps blend everything, so I tried that). Then while on a mission to buy some desperately needed White Out, I popped into the sticker aisle at Walmart and found the perfect sticker set for my page. I decided to do a little reinventing. Unfortunately for me, the way it was designed didn’t leave a whole lot of space for my sticker additions, and I also discovered the airplane isn’t just a sticker. It’s an actual decoration attaché and quite thick. I caution using anything that doesn’t lie flat in your book, like a true sticker or the like. It makes your book bulky, but it is also difficult to work on the following pages.

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Keep an eye out for some of my favorite spread designs in an upcoming post and a new list of supplies I’ve added to my arsenal toolbox since getting started. 

Are you a die-hard perfectionist or do you believe in a little White Out here and there?