We’re trying something a bit different this week! Nikki sent me a selection of mystery items to incorporate into my April journal spreads, and it was such a fun way to shake things up. Here’s what I received:

Stabilo pastel HB pencil in pink

Stabilo metallic 68 marker in copper

Kaweco Pearl Fountain Pen

Monochrome crosses washi tape

I absolutely loved the mixed fonts of the number stickers, especially the retro carnival font. Lettering is not my strong suit but I’m determined to get better at it, so I decided to incorporate this throughout my April set up for some extra practice! My last few themes have been quite drawing-heavy, and I haven’t necessarily had the time to keep this up throughout the month, so I decided to let the lettering and washi do the talking this time.

Cover Page

I used the Stabilo pencil to roughly sketch out my layouts, and added a few bits from my stash to complement the mystery items:

• Golden dots washi tape - a personal favourite of mine!
• Black and kraft Archer & Olive papers
• Pastel dot grid pad in perfect peach
• Pentel fude touch brush calligraphy pen in black
• Sakura pigma micron
• Pentel hybrid gel pen in gold
• Sakura gelly roll in white 10
• Kaweco fountain pen ink cartridge in pearl black 

Some of my lettering is decided wibbly but I was rather pleased with how this came out, especially as this was my first time filming myself journaling and I had to sit at a rather awkward angle! I love how the white on black letters look with the monochrome crosses washi tape.

Habit Tracker / Time Sheet 

I just love this combination of black, white, kraft, peach and metallic! I used the same colours for my September 2021 theme, but they look so different. I completely forgot to use the Pentel 68 copper pen on my cover page, but I used it for my mixed font titles and habit tracker headings. I’m only now noticing that I coloured one box too many on my “sew” habit tracker heading, so here’s a friendly reminder that absolutely everyone makes mistakes in their bullet journal and it really doesn’t matter!

Brain Dump 

I only started including brain dump pages in my bullet journal about six months ago, but they’re so useful! No more scrabbling around for scraps of paper! I didn’t want to use up too much brain-dumping real estate with decoration, so I kept it simple with a mix and match font heading and more washi tape.

Weekly Spread

I always add my weekly spreads one at a time, in case I want to use any extra pages for notes or planning projects, so I’ve only made one so far. I don’t like splitting a week up across pages, so I added the first three days to my final March weekly spread instead. This layout has become my go to recently: I add my daily tasks on the left, and write a huge ongoing master to do list on the right! 

I used this days of the week washi to complement the number stickers and created another collaged title to add a pop of colour. As I mentioned earlier: I was filming this spread as I made it, and didn’t realise quite how off-centre some of the days of the week were, but I’ve since shifted them. Oh, how I love repositionable washi tape!

I didn’t use the beautiful Kaweco pearl fountain pen for my layouts, but will be using it to fill out my journal spreads. It’s just so beautiful and I can’t stop staring at it and twirling it around in the sunlight! 

If you want to see a time-lapse of me creating these spreads and making multiple mistakes, please check out my Instagram reel! If you’d like someone else to decide which supplies you should include in your bullet journal spreads, we’ve got another fun reel coming in a few days’ time which should help with that!

As always, if you’ve been inspired by any of the ideas in this blog post, we’d love to see your creations! Please tag @nikkissupplystore on Instagram, where you can find heaps more journaling and stationery inspiration. You can also follow me, @joy.margot, for more craft content and pictures of my cat.