Egads. January has been rough. I had some tests done at the hospital early in the month and although the tests themselves were not overly …anything… I had originally expected to need a day or two to recover…and even a fortnight afterward I am still shaking off the whole experience. It’s nothing specific, nothing life-threatening (knock on wood), just an inability to get back into the normal regular flow of life.

The big takeaway from this experience was — well, for one, my fourth sweater this year is not yet complete–and they’ve been taking me no more than four days at a time to complete– that I could not keep up with any sort of tracking in my bujo–I haven’t drawn cards (Tarot/Oracle) since a day or two before going in for the tests…and some of my days were just barely scribbled notes to myself with not much else.

As I began to feel a bit better, I pulled out a journal that I had made a few years ago and began to prep it for February. Once I have a spare minute in silence I will make a flip-through video (not at night). The book itself has two different types of hand-dyed paper. One paper I made over a decade ago on the floor of the kitchen of our apartment and it was so much fun. Plain old copy paper–and leftover Easter egg dye. It’s a beautiful blue mottled paper–and it has been bound into a completely different book prior to being in this one–which means my binding style had a few requirements to make everything mesh together.

The other paper is simple coffee-dyed papers that I made a few years ago…baked, ironed, the whole nine yards. I had actually begun using this journal as an art journal at some point–so the first two two-page spreads were painted out as backgrounds…I am just going to move forward. The artwork is color in my journal and I have an appreciation for that.

The journal is Coptic bound. To stick with the original binding holes of the blue pages, there are only three holes…so I glued the first and last pages to the corresponding covers…and in between every signature I bound the last page of one signature to the first page of the next signature. This was to give the journal some stability. Not counting the four painted pages, nor the four pages marked Index (for the table of contents)…this book has four hundred pages total. I might *might* be able to put three months of bujo into this thing…and with it being Coptic bound…there is plenty of room for tip-ins and all sorts of things glued in, stickers, washi, whatever else I want to stick in there.

I have set up the month of February completely–minus filling out every single page with every tracker, topic, and so forth. I need to finish filling out the headers on my daily pages more than anything. I filled in the complete first week — and then made sure the rest of the dailies were marked as such and ready for the headers and whatnot as I get time to fill them in.

Having everything already set up for me is going to be a lifesaver once I move into this journal in a few days. I have also been planning to step up my level of reflection in my bujo as well…so those are already ready and waiting in my planner. End of month reflection. Start of week, mid-week and, end of week reflection. I have space for goal setting, for action plans, for card pulls, everything else–and space to throw in a little bit of writing every single day as well.

It feels good.

More on this journal coming in February.

Questions? Comments? Leave them below.