i did some cooldown sketches trying to nail down serene’s roommates designs but didn’t really like them all that much.. except for this nacho and a corner serene :)c

Here’s my current collection of journals and notebooks! The minty one on the top left was actually my first journal/to do list notebook that I used in college (it’s hard to read, but the cover says “I am very busy”). I was having a hard time remembering assignments and keeping track of school work, so in 2017 (the spring semester of my junior year) I started writing down what assignments I had from each class every day and when they were due, which dramatically decreased the amount of time I spent crunching to finish a forgotten paper or workbook. 

Then the small pink one it the middle of the top row was my first actual Bullet Journal. My flute professor had been using the technique, and she reccommended it to me when I mentioned that I had to write down everything or I would forget it. It was a cheap quality notebook, because the article I read suggested using a cheaper notebook for your first project so that if you ended up not liking it, you hadn’t wasted a nicer notebook. That little journal carried me all the way through the rest of college and when I got my first teaching position the fall after I graduated, I started using it to plan my classes before I realized that A) I was out of space and B) I should upgrade to a sturdier journal.

The black journal on top was my second bullet journal, that I attempted to use during my first year of teaching. It quickly devolved into more of a doodle/scribble book, though I did use it a fair amount during the wedding planning process that I was also doing in the fall 2018/spring 2019 timeframe. 

The big pink notebook on the top right is barely used, but it was intended to be an archive of original characters and settings that I come up with, and I like it too much to get rid of.

The pink one on the bottom left, which reads “Don’t forget, you are awesome,” was my attempt at the start of this school year to get back into bullet journaling as a method of planning things out. And while there were some nicely functioning things about it, overall the book was just a bit too big and bulky to be used easily and I had difficulty using it in my every day life. It does have perferrated, detachable pages though, so even though I’ve abandoned it as a journal, I still get a lot of use out of it as stationary for things like shopping lists and recipie cards. 

The owl cover book is a journal my dad got me for my birthday in high school, and I decided all the way back then that it would exclusively be a poetry journal. There are poems from as far back as 2012 in that thing, and I love it (it’s also the icon for this blog!).

And finally, the two notebooks on the bottom are what I am currently using everyday! On the far right is a simple, store bought 2020 calendar/day planner that I bought during the first week of January, planning to try and get control of my life (I’d say “again” but idk if I’ve ever had stellar, blogworthy control over my life XD), and then the purple journal is my current bullet journal, which I bought the next week after being A) unable to resist a new moleskin dotted notebook and B) wanting to try bullet journaling again this year. 

This isn’t even counting my sketchbooks, which I have....four of, I think? XD I can’t help it, I’m a notebook fiend. They just bring me joy <3 How many notebooks do you guys have?