November Jacaranda Floral Bullet Journal Theme
Every year in October my city bursts into an explosion of lilac and lavender as the jacaranda trees spring into bloom. It’s a spectacular time, and it’s fleeting, but I wanted it to last a little longer this year so I’m bringing jacaranda season with me into November in my bullet journal. It’s a delicate, pastel, spring-time appropriate and cool-toned theme to help me feel the creeping summer heat a little less!
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I’m still riding the floral high of my birthday bullet journal set up, so I followed a similar vibe for November and sketched some cute little jacaranda flowers for the calendar page. I wasn’t satisfied with any reference photos I could find online, so I nabbed a bunch off jacaranda flowers off a nearby tree and used them as my reference instead. They don’t make good home decor - they wilt so quickly!
I was inspired by the colours in this gorgeous painting, so I fished through my pen collection and came up with this brush pen combo: the Faber-Castell Pitt Artist brush pen in lilac 239, purple sage Tombow 623, glacier blue Tombow 491 and warm grey Tombow N89. I’ve used the lightest lilac as a base colour, the purple Tombow for shadows and the blue Tombow for highlights.
I’ve also added a few kisses of washi tape - the floral patterned tape is from the Washi Tape Shop’s Tenohira Sakura set, and the grey skinny washi is from a local Brisbane stationery store called Mint My Desk.
Jacaranda Floral Doodles
I’ve repeated the cover’s illustrative jacaranda theme on my gratitude and habit tracker spread, where I’ll colour each flower with the shade that I’ve assigned to correspond to my mood on each day. These cuties are lovely and so much fun, but also quite time consuming, so I opted not to use them across every page in this setup. I’ve worked out an easier way to include the jacarandas on the other pages!
Drawing Easy Jacaranda Sprigs
On the more data-heavy pages, I’ve pulled things back a bit - I didn’t have the time or patience to draw those individual flowers on every single page, so I’ve added a simplified jacaranda branch design to accent headings and functional elements instead. These ones are just made of little dots of colour, and are super easy to recreate! There’s a mini-tutorial in the video at the top of the page if you’d like to learn.
Mainly you start with the grey stems, then add the lightest lilac to create the shape with little dots - a shape like fairy floss or cotton candy on a stick. Then add flecks of the darker lavender towards the bottom, and flecks of the light blue as a highlight towards the top. They make great speedy decorations on busy pages!
My Favourite Weekly Spread
My go-to weekly layout of the past few months has been working so well that I didn’t want to change the bones of the design, but I also wanted it to be easily replicated and speedy to set up. Just like in October, I’ve opted to add collaged washi tapes and stickers to the weeklies instead of drawing the decorative elements. I picked up a pack of purple paper stickers at Mint My Desk for exactly this purpose and layered them with the Tenohira sakura washi tapes, and I’m so excited with how this first weekly turned out!
The notebook I’ve used for the second half of 2021 is the Notebook Therapy 160GSM original size journal in Mint Matcha, and the headings throughout this layout were done with a silver Sharpie.