As mentioned in last month’s post, I needed to create multiple themes before leaving to travel in October and November. Having put so much time and effort into the witchy theme of last month, I experienced a little bit of creative fatigue. For that reason I chose a minimalist style for November, illustrated with hand painted decorations in a rainy autumn theme.

Dare to stand out

While I didn’t actually choose to include a quote in this month’s theme, I was reminded of this phrase while I painted this cover page. Being different became my superpower once I learned how to be comfortable with being myself. Standing out is something that can be a good thing, if you’re willing to do so!

I saw this month’s minimalist style for daily writing on Pinterest (source on Instagram) and felt really drawn to it. I really like the minimalist aesthetic and this seems like a fun way to make a quick template for loose writing on the lines underneath the days of the week.

I love graphs. In fact I’ve prepared a spreadsheet to turn the data I collect in my bullet journal into graphs for the whole year. Maybe I’ll share some of that some time after the year ends, stay tuned.

This tracker is also in graph style. Each day I mark down a colour point and then connect the dots to visualise the fluctuations in my mood and symptoms.

I have no excuse for the handwritten titles, other than ‘I suck at handwriting’. I bought a practice book and I’m planning to do a bit of practice every day while on vacation, so hopefully these tragically awful handwritten titles will be a thing of the past after that. 😅

Considering the rainy theme, I wanted to track something with drops of rain. However, I knew beforehand that drawing 30 raindrops to colour in would end with me cursing and swearing. I vividly remember drawing 31 bees… oh those bloody bees!

So instead I made this custom tracker in Inkscape, printed it and stuck it into my journal. I’ll draw a raindrop for each exercise and habit I’ve done that day. The clouds actually hide a little pouch, in which I’ve slid a card to specify which habit belongs to which letter, since I don’t like to define my habits too long before using the tracker. The top four icons indicate my exercise, so ‘none’, ‘walk’, ‘physical therapy’ (I do a lot of balancing exercises there) and ‘cycle’.

I didn’t do a lot of decorating this month, but I managed to put an extra little umbrella in at the end. I really like how this theme came out and I’m glad that I was able to leave for 3,5 weeks without having to worry about setting up a theme while away on vacation.

Let me know what you think in a comment below!