Learn Bullet Journaling: Part 4 - Weekly Spreads

Last post, you were able to see how I came up with my floral theme for April in my bullet journal. I now want to walk you through how I set up my weekly spreads, including how I decided on a layout, how I illustrate it, and how I use it to help me stay organized.

Inspiration

Once again, I headed to Pinterest to get some ideas for how I wanted to lay out my weekly spreads. I’ve been keeping a bullet journal consistently now for 4 months. I like to mix the layout up each time. Variety is the spice of life!

If you search “bullet journal weekly spread” or “weekly spread” ideas on Pinterest, you’ll find endless possibilities.

Here’s what I used to get inspired:

Creating

To keep my theme consistent, I wanted to use the same kind of header for “April” that I did on my cover page. I also wanted to use similar colors. You don’t need to do this if you don’t want to! It’s totally up to what makes you happy.

With a pencil, I had to work out where my lines would go. My journal is a different size than some of the ones on Pinterest, so I spent a few minutes working out a grid system that would work for me. As you can see, I had to adjust it a few times.

The current pandemic has made things a bit unpredictable in my life. Writing out a monthly schedule doesn't work that well. I wanted to include a quick view of the month, along with a section for notes, and an area for things coming up next week. 

I personally don’t like to include trackers with my weekly spreads. I usually put them at the end of the month in their own collection section. When I started journaling, I kept a lot more trackers than I do now. Migrating my information every month was really useful and helped me figure out what I liked to track. I’ll get more into my collection pages and trackers in another blog post.

The first week in April was a short week. Instead of squishing two weeks into one, I wanted to keep it simple by just expanding my “notes” section. 

Once that was done, the fun part started! I filled in some basic stuff and worked on the artistic part of this page as the week went on. If you’re a minimalist, you can stop your design here. There’s nothing wrong with having less on a page!

I wanted to illustrate the blank spaces with something fun that related to my floral theme. I thought flowers would be nice. Drawing illustrations from photos is fun to me, so I went to Google to find some pictures of flowers to use as reference.

I wanted to find a nice pattern that could fill space too, so I also went to Pinterest. I searched for “floral backgrounds” and came up with another image that I took inspiration from. I enjoyed how the lines were a simple way of filling space, and the pops of color were pretty without overpowering the black lines.

Here’s what I came up with after drawing for a few minutes:

Using my Tombow Brush Pens, I colored in the flowers and added some pale blue circles in the background to add visual interest.

And there you have it! That’s how I set up my April bullet journal weekly pages. I will repeat the grid pattern for every week in April, adding different illustrations on the edges. The next two pages will cover April 5-11, 12-18, etc.

It took me about 5 minutes to set up the simple version of each weekly page and another 10 minutes to create the illustrations.

Have you started a bullet journal this month? Are you making some cool spreads? We’d love to see them! Share them with us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter!