A Bullet Journal is a great way to keep your life in one place and have notes on what you need to do while being creative!
Hello again! Going from losing a beloved pet to the election to travel exhausted me a bit too much to do any November posts. I felt like my world collapsed on the day Jiji left and it took much longer to recover than I anticipated. Well… recover enough to be function. I don’t know if we ever truly recover from loss.
But let’s put the sad stuff aside because it’s the most wonderful time of the year! I truly love December, it’s a month of lights and merriment and countdowns. After Halloween, I got a Nightmare Before Christmas countdown clock so I can do countdowns all year long. I don’t know why but I find it cathartic.
December is a season of red & green and blue & white. The holiday colors and lights do brighten up the city under the blanket of snow. Inspired by the holiday color, I decided to go back to watercolor. There was a tape technique that I was excited to try out and it turned out amazing.
Check out the Craft section of MCG for more fun patterns in strings and things or more unlimited ideas.
December
I love a good argyle pattern. And while this isn’t exactly argyle, the diamond pattern definitely takes inspiration. I started by layering each patterned section with tape. If I was methodical about this, I would have measured the distance between the tape. But… I just decided to eyeball it and it’s very obvious in some areas.
With the paper taped off into diamonds, it was then time to add the watercolor paint. While I knew I wanted the pattern to be red and green, I didn’t know how I wanted the colors to interact. There was a part of my that wanted to do a red row and then a green row but that felt too… clean. I’m not exactly sure how to describe it but it just didn’t vibe with me.
I landed on doing a color transition from red to green back to red back to green, etc. This got a little muddy on the transitions but I kind of like that. Since the tape was colored, the paint definitely obscured the pattern for me.
After the paint dried, it was time to remove the tape. I used washi tape because it works well with paper and had a lesser chance of hurting the paper when pulled off. That’s not to say it was perfect. Peeling off the tape was very satisfying but didn’t come without incident.
There were a couple of points where the paper wanted to come the tape. In those cases, I would put the tape back and try to remove it from the other end. This would typically minimize the damage to the paper.
With the tape off, the pattern really came together, and I love it. The final pattern just looks so pretty and, while the colors are slightly muddled, the tape made the lines clean and crisp. Definitely one of my favorite spreads to date.
October Habits and Calendar
Since I loved the main spread looked, I wanted to carry the pattern over to the habit and calendar pages as well. This was a little more difficult because more needed to be taken into consideration. Where on the page should the pattern be? And what obstacles would it have to go around. All things to think about.
Both the calendar and the habit tracker gave me a bit of trouble as I was trying to paint around some of the printed elements. While I did well, some small painting outside (or rather inside) the lines but all in all, the final look was amazing.
Last Month’s Habits
With everything going on, it’s not surprising that I wasn’t the most on my game when it came to continuing my habits. But I think I still did a pretty decent job. Honestly, having a list of habits to focus on really helped push me through some of the time. When I was feeling listless and didn’t know what to do, I would often look at my habits and pick one to keep my attention. It helped get me back into a somewhat normal routine.
Enjoy the Moment
As the year ends and I begin to reminisce on random things I am once again reminded how important it is to enjoy the moments that you have. Moments do not last forever, and time can slip through your hands so easily. I know this is a little somber, but I can’t help but be when I think back to all those I miss.
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