what i’m working on: writing letters

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Holy mail! I’ve been drowning, in the best way possible, in letters. It’s been crazy! I’ve been getting mail from strangers or people I haven’t heard of, in addition to my regular pen pals. I don’t know where everyone came from! I blame Letter Writing Month 😉 It has been really hard to keep on top of everything and it certainly didn’t help that I basically took all of January off from writing letters. After my bike accident, I was in a super weird place and I had a really hard time putting pen to paper. Things are way better now and I’ve been slowly replying to everyone. As of this post, I only have about 7 replies left!

One thing that has been incredibly helpful for me in staying on top of my replies is my bullet journal. For February, I created a little spread to keep track of all the letters I had to write. It was a little daunting at first! When I created the page, I had about 15 people to write back. Seeing that on paper was like, “whoaaa, how am I ever going to write everyone back!?” but it proved to be really motivating for me. I find that I am really motivated by crossing things off. Also in my bullet journal, I create a task in my daily spreads that is “write a letter”. Just having that task there, and knowing that I want to cross it off, will motivate me to write at least one letter.

I was really hoping to complete all of my replies by the end of February but last weekend kind of got away from me and I just couldn’t do it. I was so close! But it shouldn’t be long before I get all caught up. I really hope I can do it this weekend.

what i’m working on

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For the new year, I started a bullet journal. In December, I found a video by Boho Berry, which was a flip through of her bullet journal and I immediately fell in love. I’ve never, ever been one for planning or making goals or anything like that but I have always been a list maker and a journaler. I would have multiple post-its notes floating around of things I wanted to do, stuff I wanted to check out or things I wanted to buy. The idea of putting all of this into one simple journal was incredibly appealing. It was also really appealing to start journaling again. I journaled a ton as a kid/teenager and sort of stopped in my early twenties. I love looking back on those times in my life!

In addition to the journal, I use a variety of pens in it. I love my Tombow Dual Brush Pens for headers and making the colored dots. I also use the Paper Mate Flair pens for the daily headers. This month, I’m going to start using my pack of Staedtler pens!

The bullet journal is a super easy system and you basically customize it to work for you. As I mentioned, I’m not big on goals so I don’t have a lot of things I need to do each day, but there are things that I should get done so it’s nice to jot that down and have a reminder there. I’m much better at getting things done when I write down the task. I used Google Calendar for a long time but it’s so easy for me to forget about and ignore. I look at this journal at least once a day, usually more. It’s perfect.

The journal I use is the Leuchtturm 1917 with dots. I purchased the orange cover just because I couldn’t find a purple one with dots. Out the of the colors I could find with dots, orange was my favorite. I’m hoping I can snag a purple one to use when this one is full. I love the Leuchtturm journal as it already has numbered pages and an index. One of the big things about bullet journaling is indexing all of your spreads and collections.

After the index, I jotted down my key. Mine is really simple because I honestly don’t do that much. Everything that I have as a “to do” is something that will get done that specific day. I don’t have a need to migrate tasks or anything like that. I also don’t have a lot of appointments (besides dentist appointments now…) so just having the open circle to differentiate an appointment versus task works for me!

I also have a brain dump as one of the first few pages. I like having a place where I can quickly jot down things that come to mind or things that I want to include in the journal at some point. It’s very helpful!

After the key and brain dump, I began my January spread. I included the first three months of the year on the left side so I could easily do future planning, if needed. On the right, it breaks down January by day and it’s a great overview of things that I have done or want to do during the month. It’s a great way to keep track of appointments or days off since you don’t typically do the daily spreads in advance.

One of my favorite things about Boho Berry’s journal was her tracker. I think that was the reason I fell in love with this system. It’s so important for me to have a reminder of things that I want to do daily and it’s also motivating. I love being able to fill in each box when I complete a daily task. I also added a blog tracker so I could easily keep track of which blog posts I’ve done or need to do.

I include a lot of collections in my journal. This is my “Music to Check Out”, which is my most important collection. I often hear songs that make me want to check out the band’s other music but I always forget. I love having this reminder!

You can also check out my bullet journal flip through video over on YouTube.

Do you bullet journal? Tell me what you love about it!

what i’m working on

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I’ve been really big on making stickers lately. I recently purchased a refill for my little sticker machine and I love turning random papers into stickers. I also recently purchased a Gocco at a garage sale. It was a complete set, bulbs, paints and screens.

I decided to make some flora stickers using vintage illustrations in my collection. I picked a few images out of my handy filing cabinet and exposed them to the Gocco screen. I hear the screens are re-usable but I haven’t tested that theory yet. The Gocco makes things so easy and fun! I don’t have an actual printer (hello, 21st century, I might meet you some day) so it’s fun to be able to make reproductions of those illustrations the “old-fashioned” way. The Gocco is way easy to use but I still don’t quite understand what the blue filter does when you are exposing the screen.

I really like the way these turned out and put them up for sale in my shop! I think they would make nice little decorations on an envelope or even on some stationery. Who doesn’t want to stick mushrooms on everything?

What I’m Working On: ATCs

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Last month, I won a little Instagram giveaway the talented Stephanie hosted. I barely ever win anything like this so I was super excited. She was sending out little packs of ephemera to make ATCs. I was even more excited because I was just getting into ATCs at that time!

I love receiving mail from Stephanie because she is so creative and always send really awesome things. She happened to use my favorite stamps on her envelope, too! Hooray.

As you can see, she sent me a ton of paper elements! I was looking forward to using all these up by making some really cool ATCs. I’ve been really diggin’ bright, loud colors lately so this selection was right up my alley. I love all the dots and fun colors.

Here are some of the ATCs I made with the bits Stephanie sent. I’m pretty happy with them!

What I’m Working On

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This weekend seemed busier than usual for me! Although most of it was spent indoors, I felt like I was constantly creating or organizing. Did you have a productive weekend?

One super fun thing I worked on this weekend was a zine! The amazingly awesome company I work for puts out a zine for the employees every quarter. I’ve submitted pages to the zine but, this quarter, I’m lucky enough to be part of the team! Everyone in the company are welcome to submit whatever they want to the zine, and the zine team makes the submissions pretty and puts the entire zine together. I had 4 submissions to work on! This is one of them. I decided to do all the pages digitally, as I have my entire collection of images scanned into the computer, and it’s so much easier to work that way. I had a ton of fun doing each page. It inspired me to get started on another zine!

Envelopes, envelopes, envelopes! I learned a new trick that makes my lift 1000 times easier when it comes to making envelopes: getting the larger sized envelopes, painting/collaging the entire front, and then folding it in half to make a normal-sized envelope. It’s a bit of a waste but I’ve always had so much trouble coming up with something to put on the back of an envelope. Now they are more cohesive and it saves me so much time!

ATCs! When I’m waiting for paint to dry on envelopes, I typically start making an ATC. I switch back and forth while I’m waiting for things to dry. Stephanie inspired me to start doing these little guys. When I was active on Swap-bot, I always wanted to make one but, for whatever reason, they always intimidated me. Anything other than an envelope intimidates me, really. I’m starting to branch out a bit! I have a bunch of little images that are perfectly sized for ATCs.