Happy Christmas

I hope you are having a wonderful Christmas.

Thank you so much for reading my blog and following along with my various projects.  I really appreciate that you give your time to this.

Thank you for joining me today.
Bernice

Merry Christmas

Planners and Planning

For 2018 I would like to keep track of a variety of things – my life, my creative life, my word for the year, inspirational quotes – all in one place rather than on scrappy bits of paper or stored in the numerous filing cabinets of my brain. I like Valerie’s description of what she was going to do at the beginning of 2017 - ‘a loose design format to happily contain my thoughts, prayers, dreams and activities of the year.’

I’ve tried various things in the past. There was the Documented Life Project which was useful at the time but eventually became a chore. I tried the Dylusions Dyary but it was too similar to DLP and actually the very thing that I thought would be helpful – Dyan’s art on every other page became a turn-off for me as I couldn’t find how to make it my own, short of putting gesso over the page!

I have followed Seth Apter’s Artifacts posts this year and wanted some way to record workshops and work but didn’t feel that the Artifacts route was one I wanted to take.

Valerie uses what she calls her Everyday Journal and Mary has a Commonplace Book.   I think they do a variation that suits them of the same thing.

I spent several days researching bullet journals and planners, using Pinterest & YouTube. It was an interesting experience as over those days my internet connection had been reduced to approximately 0.97mbps instead of the normal 6.97mbps. This was really, really slow. And then it went down to 0.2 which meant that it could barely load a website page.

Bullet Journals are interesting but seem very complicated. They are about being extremely organised but actually I don’t want to be extremely organised, I just want to be more productive and more creative. I can see there are bits that would be useful but I’m not interested in what the BJ jargon calls collections. Basically they are lists and whilst I will incorporate some lists into whatever I come up with, listing everything isn’t what I need.

I set up a Pinterest board to collate my findings.

As I looked at the various things on offer I realised that what I needed to do was ask myself some questions. I needed to know what I did want to include and what I definitely didn’t want.

Did I want any of the following?

• daily diary or planner
• weekly diary or planner
• Monthly calendar or planner
• Yearly calendar or planner
• A list of goals - yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly
• A list of books I’ve read
• A list of films I‘ve seen
• A list of places to visit
• Travel planning
• Quotes
• Bible verses
• Prayers
• Photos
• My art
• Sermon notes
• Journaling
• Projects
• Health & fitness tracker, water consumption tracker
• Monthly memories
• A list of online courses
• A list of workshops booked
• Gratitude lists
• To Do lists
• A monthly or weekly review

There's also the question of how creative I want the journal to look.  I don't draw but I have loads of stencils I could use to make it look attractive.  Plus I bought a few more!

I'm nearly there!  I've got the Leuchtturm1917 notebook and I'm trying out various of my pens on the back page but most of them bleed through the paper so I went out and bought these.

So, I'm all set.  I just need to make the decision about what I'm including from the list above and then actually set up the book so it's ready to go on January 1st.

I'll let you know how I get on.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

December Daily 2

I showed you my first collection of pages on the blog here.  Here are the next few days.

With the snow coming down on Friday I really didn't know whether we would be able to go to the Open Day at Hilary Beattie's studio - a 100 miles from my house.  However it was a lovely day and we got there and back in good time and had a great time at the studio.

The next day the snow returned and the roads were treacherous.  Church was cancelled.  My car disappeared under 8" of snow.

I don't have a story for December 11th and will come back to it.  The day was spent indoors because the snow had frozen.  Maybe that should be the story!

I put the tree up on the 12th.  According to Facebook's On this Day, I regularly put the tree up on the 12th!  Who knew!

And then the news we had been waiting for!  Our second grandson was born.

In the evening we celebrated Flynn's birth at my church small group's Christmas social. It's so lovely to celebrate with close friends - especially when your new grandson is in Australia.

I'm really pleased that I am mostly up to date.  Only one day to fill in.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice