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Thursday, June 1, 2017

Journaling and Planning: May 2017 update

More progress and evolution to my planner!

My planning journey is like my quilting journey: from the first weeks I immediately know what I like and what my overall style is. However the more I plan, the more tools I want to buy and the more experiments I want to run! This month, off to a new journal!

For disclaimers about how I personally use this Journal/Planner system, please refer to these previous posts: April reviewMarch reviewDecember review (evolution of a Quilter's Planner), November reviewOctober review, September review.

As mentioned last month, while I initially loved the disc bound system that I used to transform my Quilter's planner, it starts to bother me the unused layout that I have to erase to create my own... and it's hard to write with those discs... and it's a bother to take the page out every single time...
Long story short, I moved into a (smaller) bound journal. I found a fantastic one (pretty cheap) at Micheals... it has thick paper, which means I can play with markers and be more creative... having less pages it's also good because I can finish it in few months and if I don't like it I can change system again :)


Spoiler alert... I moved out of that journal too :) while I liked the blank pages and the thick paper that allowed me to color in without ruining the back of the page, I need some kind of structure, and the dot grid of the Emerald Leuchtturm 1917 (in the picture above) provides the right amount of space and structure. But more on that next month...

For now, let me show you how I used my dark pink, artist notebook.

Below you can see the daily tracker, with my weight tracker and some excercise tracker. I also included on the same page the Weekly/Monthly ToDos and the Habits that I would focus for the month: it's great to have everything on a single page!

(click on each picture if you want to see them in more details)



I kept it up with the Free Motion Daily Doodle spread, decorated with the artist of the month... see below to see who it is :) each day is a different design from Leah Day's blog... it is very interesting to practise all these designs in small spaces and see if I like making them or not: no thread or fabric wasted :) This month I also added a coloring legend to remember which designs I love, like or don't like: that's essential for times when I want to pick a quilting designs and I don't remember which one I enjoyed and which was frustrating to draw!!



The week-by-week daily activities (with the Weekly Specials recipes meals in each page),



The Fitness Mandala (split between steps and water), and the tracker for the Art with Fabric blog hop: it's complicated to coordinate so many people and a tracker made the process much easier!!



And the "Doodle an Artist" spread, that migrated to a different journal!
I reflected on what I want to accomplish with this project, and I found another journal in my house that I wanted to test (Moleskine): I heard that pages are terrible for heavy pen/markers/colors so I decided to dedicate the entire journal to doodling different artists! If the pen/color bleed through the pages, I can glue pages and move on.



This month, in my "Doodle an Artist" I picked Beverly Fishman, an Artist-in-Residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art. For the past twenty-five years she has worked as a full-time artist and has dedicated herself to educating young artists.
As usual I tried to "Steal like an Artist" and extract part of her pieces that spoke to me and mesh them all together in two pages!

Last but not least...
I had few tough weeks and I needed some cheerful and inspirational quotes
Keep our composure... from Old school and Bon Jovi's song "it's my life"



I am all set up for June: I changed up few things that I want to track, dropped some, added others: this is the beauty of this planning style, you can change it up to suit your mood and style!

If you have any question about my planner, my spreads, my comments, etc, don't hesitate to comment below. Also please share planning, tracking and productivity tips, as those are always welcome!!!!

1 comment:

  1. You are quite the artist - I'm impressed with all of your drawings!

    ReplyDelete

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