The new year always seems to sneak up on me SO quickly once Christmas is over, so I wanted to get ahead this year and make my January bullet journal setup nice and early! As seems to be becoming a bit of a habit for me, I’ve gone for a super quick and easy style this month: a simple, blue plaid pattern, some (purposely messy) brown line work and, because it is me, after all, some brown craft paper.

Table of Contents

• Equipment
• Cover + Quote Page
• Monthly Calendar
• Weekly Spreads
  • Week 1
  • Week 2
  • Week 3
  • Week 4
  • Week 5
• January Review
• Final Thoughts

Equipment

To make this setup, I used the following equipment:

• Tombow ABT dual brush pens, in the shades 491 (Glacier Blue) and 553 (Mist Purple).
• Uni Pin Fine Line pen: 0.5, sepia.
• Sakura Quickie Glue pen.
• Brown craft paper.
• Scissors.
• Corner rounder.

Cover + Quote Page

For my Cover Page, I filled the majority of the page with a blue plaid pattern, made using the two Tombow pens. I used the brown fineliner to draw a messy border around the pattern and to write the ‘January’ heading on some brown craft paper, which I stuck in using my Sakura glue pen.

It took me a while to decide on a fitting quote for my Quote Page this month— I wanted something that reflected the fact that January is the start of a new year, but most of the ‘New Year, New Me’ quotes feel a bit too… on the nose for me. As I was desperately trying to find a qupte, Natasha Bedingfield’s song Unwritten just happen to pop into my head and… it was just the perfect choice, so I went for that.

Monthly Calendar

As always, I went for a classic grid-style layout for my Monthly Calendar spread, where each of the boxes is a 6×6 square. I drew the grid and wrote in the dates using my brown fineliner, then filled the majority of the remaining space with more of that same, plaid pattern. Just like with my Cover Page, I wrote the ‘January’ heading on brown craft paper, then stuck it into the space in the top left corner.

Weekly Spreads

I usually include at least a couple more pages before going into my Weekly Spreads, but I wanted to keep this setup simple and pared back, so I opted to skip those pages this time around and go straight into my weeklies.

I’m using the same layout for my weekly spreads that I have used in my setups for the past few months, because it’s been working really well for me. To create it, I just trimmed the central pages right down, so there’s plenty of space on the far left and right for me to put in some master task/notes lists, while the trimmed down pages then house the daily tasks lists. I also used a corner rounder to soften the edges of the trimmed down pages, just to tie in with the style of this setup.

Week 1

The first ‘week’ of January 2025 only contains 5 days, so I was able to give each daily box in this weekly a little more space than I usually would. The first weekly sits on the same page as the task list on the far left, so I had plenty of space to add in more plaid decoration.

Week 2

The second weekly features a full week of 7 days, so I used my classic, 2-up/4-down layout for the daily task lists, leaving a space in the bottom right for the weekly subheading. I still managed to squeeze a little plaid section in though, just to keep things cohesive!

Week 3

The third weekly is exactly the same as the second, but I’ve changed the location of the weekly subheading from the bottom right corner to the top right.

Week 4

Again, the fourth weekly has the same layout as the two preceding weeklies but, for this spread, I’ve moved the weekly subheading to the top left corner.

Week 5

January ends on a Friday this year, so I opted to include the first two days of February in this final weekly. This page also includes the space on the far right for notes.

January Review

Finally, we have my January Review page. On the right-hand page, I have the ‘January Review’ heading, written in brown fineliner on brown craft paper, plus a large section of the plaid pattern, on top of which I will stick my monthly polaroid.

On the left-hand page, I have all my usual sections: ATP & WTA Top 10, my #1 memory from the month and my monthly playlist. I laid these sections out in the same way as in my December setup, which gave me lots of space to add another plaid section.

Final Thoughts

I’m really happy with how this setup turned out and I’m even happier with how quick it was to create! I literally set the whole thing up in an evening (while watching Jamie Cooks Christmas, because of course). I also surprised myself with how much I like the purposely messy linework— I think there’s something about doing two messy lines over the top of each other that makes it look extra intentional.

I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about my January 2025 bullet journal setup— I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below!

Gemma

xxx

My theme this month was the BBC show ‘Death in Paradise’, which is a much-loved detective show here in the UK. Honestly, it’s main appeal is that it’s set on a Caribbean island so all of the visuals are so dreamy- it’s just what I need when Christmas is over and I am quickly reminded that winter in the UK is kind of a downer once all of the twinkly lights have been taken down :(. Anyway… new seasons of the show ALWAYS come out in January- as in, every single series (bar the very first one) has been released in January, so I figured I was pretty safe setting up this theme to celebrate the new season- especially seeing as we had the Christmas special on Boxing Day! Alas, it is 12th January today, and no announcement for the release of the new season has been made. Just my luck, right? Oh well, maybe this will just get us all in the mood for when the new season does drop?

Anyway, here is how I set up this tropical (albeit a little premature) Death in Paradise-inspired bullet journal setup for January…

Table of Contents

• Equipment
• Cover Page
• Monthly Calendar
• Blog Planning
• Habits + Daily Sunshine
• Weeklies
  • Weekly 1
  • Weekly 2
  • Weekly 3
  • Weekly 4
  • Weekly 5
• January Review
• Final Thoughts

Equipment

• Muji 0.38mm pen, black.
• Tombow ABT Dual Brush Pens: N15 (black), N57 (warm grey 5), N79 (warm grey 2), N89 (warm grey 1), 491 (glacier blue), 725 (rhodamine red) and 990 (light sand).
• Sakura Gelly Roll, 10 Bold, white.
• Crayola SuperTips: mainly green and blue/teal shades, as well as one orange-y shade (the exact pens that I used are from a combination of this pastel pack and this assorted pack).
• Ruler.
• Pencil.
• Scissors.
• Eraser.
• Optional: tracing paper + printed mirror image of Death in Paradise logo.

Cover Page

I wanted the Cover Page to really incapsulate the tropical, beach-y vibes of the show, so I opted to create a little ‘landscape’ across the whole double-page spread. I started by drawing a large palm tree on the left, using my Tombow pens in the shades N57, N79, N89 and 990 for the trunk, then an array of green Crayola SuperTips for the fronds. Along the bottom of the page, I drew some flowers (which were very loosely inspired by hibiscus- I am no botanist) with my Tombow 725, then surrounded those with some leafy foliage, using the same shades of green as the palm fronds. After that, I added the beach- I used my Tombow 990 for the sand, then added stripes of blue for the ocean, working up from the palest (the Tombow 491) to the darkest (a deep teal SuperTip) shade. Finally, I added a little bit of detail to each flower, using my white Sakura Gelly Roll.

For the ‘January’ heading, I opted to recreate the Death in Paradise logo. To do this, I printed out a mirror image of the logo, traced it (leaving out the ‘Death in Paradise’ text) with a pencil onto some tracing paper, then flipped the paper over onto my journal page and went over all of the lines again to transfer the original pencil marks. Then, I went over those pencil guidelines with my Muji pen. Finally, I wrote ‘January’ in the place of the initial text and my cover page was finished!

Monthly Calendar

For the Monthly Calendar, I opted to use the same grid style that I usually go for, with each day situated in a 6×6 square box (although I have just noticed that something funky went on with the first 2 columns, so do as I say, not as I do, I guess?). I wrote the ‘January’ heading along the top using my Tombow N15 and used the 5 colours (Tombow 990 and 4 shades of blue) that I used to create the beach on the Cover Page, to colour a little dot in each grid space for the dates (which I wrote over the top using my Muji pen).

To decorate this page, I added some more flowers along the bottom, which I surrounded with some more green fronds, and drew Harry, the iconic lizard from the show (if you know, you know). Admittedly, drawing lizards is not my forte, but I’m pretty happy with how he turned out. I then drew a wood-style pattern on the right-hand side, using the same colours as the palm tree trunk from the cover page.

Blog Planning

Next up is my Blog Planning spread. I added some flowers and foliage to the top left-hand corner, and a beach doodle to the bottom right, then put the heading in block capitals along the top. I have space for 8 posts on this page, each one indicated by a ‘bar’ of one of the ‘beach’ colours, as well as a space for any Blogmas at Home planning/notes at the bottom.

Habits + Daily Sunshine

On the left-hand page, I have a space for tracking my Habits. I kind of fell out of love with habits towards the end of the last year, but I’m going to try tracking some again this month. I’m hoping to use this spread in a more productive manner than I used to- I plan to make sure that each habit is linked to my overall, yearly goals, to keep me on track and feeling positive. For each habit, I have a little subheading (made with my ‘foliage’ colours), as well as a miniature calendar for marking off when I have completed each one. To decorate the page, I added a beach doodle to the bottom left.

On the right-hand page, I have my Daily Sunshine. This is where I write down one good thing that happened each day before I go to bed, to put myself in a positive mindset. I decorated this page with some foliage doodles, then added a little dot of my ‘beach’ colours for the dates down the left-hand side, as well as highlighting every other row with my Tombow 491.

Weeklies

I always like to use tabs for my Weeklies, because they make it so much easier to navigate through the month. This month, I really wanted to run with the tropical, beach-y theme I had going on and try out a different style of tabs that I have seen all over my socials: waterfall tabs. To do this, I cut the first page down, quite far in from the edge, with a wavy line. Then, for each of the next 5 pages, I followed that same wave, just about 1cm closer to the edge. I coloured each wavy edge with my ‘beachy’ colours, starting with the sand colour and moving through to the darkest blue, to make the pages look like a seashore. Admittedly, this does cut down the size of my weekly spreads significantly, but I really LOVE how it looks- I think it really fits the vibe of the theme and it’s kind of fun and fresh, so I’m really excited about it.

Because of the limited space, I kept my theme layouts very similar: every weekly spread includes a space for each day and one for general tasks, which I have indicated via little bars of the ‘beachy’ colours. The headings are all made using black block capitals and decorated with some more foliage doodles.

Weekly 1

The first weekly had a good amount of space, because I had the full left-hand page to work with. This gave me a bit more room for the header and lots of space for my task list.

Weekly 2

The second weekly was the smallest, so I don’t have masses of room in each of my daily sections. I made the title nice and small at the bottom of the page, to maximise the space!

Weekly 3

The WHOLE time I was making this third weekly, I was telling myself, ‘Gemma, do NOT forget that the top right is the TASK section, so do NOT write a date on that sand-coloured line’. What did I do? I wrote the date…

Weekly 4

I opted to put the title for the fourth weekly down the left-hand side, so that I could maximise the space for my daily lists. I really like how this one turned out!

Weekly 5

The fifth and final weekly has the most space, which is actually kind of annoying, because I only needed space for 3 full days (31st January is a Wednesday this year). I did consider making my waves flow the other way (making the first weekly the largest), but I needed the extra space for my January Review page, which is on the back of this spread. Ah well, c’est la vie. I did also include space for any notes on the first 4 days of February in this spread, as well as my usual task box, so that filled the space up a little too.

January Review

By the end of last year, I feel like I had really nailed down what I wanted my Monthly Review spreads to contain and how I wanted the layout to work. Now, it basically feels like I just need to inject a little bit of the theme into that basic formula, which really takes the pressure off when it comes to setting up these spreads. On the right-hand page, as always, I have the header and a space for a polaroid from the month. I created the header in the same way I created the title on the Cover Page: by tracing the Death in Paradise logo and altering the text to read ‘January Review’. I added another beach doodle to the bottom left-hand corner, which the polaroid will slightly overlap, to act as the decoration, instead of my usual frame.

On the left-hand page, I included the four things I like to keep track of each month: the ATP and WTA Top 10 players, my favourite memory from the month and my 6 favourite songs, with some more foliage, for the vibes.

Final Thoughts

Okay, admittedly, I do feel a little bit silly having made this whole setup to celebrate the new season of a TV show that, apparently, isn’t even coming out this month. However, I still really love how it turned out. I had my doubts as I was making it, but everything just seemed to come together in the end? I think I’ve ended up with a really cheerful and happy and bright setup that will really help me fight off the January blues.

As an added bonus, this setup was super easy to setup. Especially compared to my 2024 fairytale-themed setup, this one was so speedy and low-maintenance: it was essentially just doodling with coloured markers? While that isn’t usually my vibe (I’m a scrapbooking kind of girl at heart, I feel), I do think it really worked this time around. It’s definitely giving me all of the tropical, beach-y, Death in Paradise (sans the death, I guess?) that I was hoping for. New season or no new season, I’m still happy I made this spread.

And that’s my January setup! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about it and let me know- do you watch Death in Paradise?

Gemma

xxx

Anyway, onto the setup. Last January, my bullet journal theme was a 1920s/Art Deco/Great Gatsby theme, which I loved. I decided to recreate that this year, but I wanted to distinguish between the two setups, so I decided to change up my colour scheme a little bit. Last year, I used a black, gold and silver colour palette. This year, I introduced an additional dark pink/burgundy shade. This colour was inspired by a dress I saw on Strictly Come Dancing, which you can see here. I just loved how, despite eschewing the black/gold we typically associate with the Art Deco style, the dress still screamed 1920s. As well as the colour, I really liked the square pattern of the dress, so I tried to incorporate that into my setup as well. I suppose, then, my theme this month was ‘Great Gatsby with a Strictly Twist‘… oddly specific, I know. I must admit, I feel like a bit of a fraud choosing this theme (for the second time, no less!) because The Great Gatsby is, well, not my favourite book. Nevertheless, the aesthetic is right up my alley, so I’ll have to get over that for the greater good of my bullet journal. Maybe I just need to give the book another try? Anyway… let’s get into it.

First up, the stationery I used for this setup:

• Black paper
• Burgundy paper (I used this, but it was definitely closer to card than paper. If you can find paper in a similar shade, I would use that instead)
• Uniball signo broad pens, gold and silver
• Sakura gelly roll, white
• Tombow ABT dual brush pen, N15 Black (I got mine in this pack)
• Muji 0.38 pen, black
• Instax mini link smartphone printer
• Scissors, glue, ruler, pencil, craft knife & cutting board

With that covered, let’s get into the spreads themselves…

Cover & Quote Pages

I like to start all of my monthly setups with a cover page (on the right side) and a quote (on the left). The cover page is where I chose to reference the Strictly Come Dancing dress by introducing that same pattern of squares/triangles highlighted by beaded fringing (which I mimicked using my gold and silver Uniball pens). For the quote page, I created a dramatic border using just the gold pen, referencing the promotional art for the 2013 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby. For the quote itself, I felt it was only fitting to use an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, but I quickly realised that I had used up all my favourites from The Great Gatsby in my setup last year! Instead, I found this quote, which I believe is from a letter written by F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter: ‘All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath’, which I wrote in the silver pen. I used the same font throughout this setup, which is my (simplified) interpretation of an Art Deco font. The letters are all tall and slim, horizontal details are placed 1/3 of the way down from the top or up from the bottom of each letter, and ‘A’, ‘U’ and ‘R’ have an added curl on the left-hand side (as can be seen in the above photo)(even if I did forget to add it to the ‘U’ in January…).

Month at a Glance

Next up is my monthly calendar. The pattern on the left-hand side of this spread is inspired by the Penguin Hardback Edition of Tender is the Night. I used my Muji 0.38 pen to draw the calendar, outlined it with my gold Uniball and used my white Sakura Gelly Roll to write on black paper strips for the days of the week along the top. For the dates, I drew small diamonds using my Tombow, then wrote the dates on top using my gold Uniball. This was nice in theory, but I found that the gold did not show up particularly well on top of the Tombow. If I were to do this again, I think I would just use the finer end of the Tombow (which I used to write ‘January’ at the bottom of the page) to write the dates in a bolder black, using the same Art Deco-style font. I also used that finer end of the Tombow, along with the Muji 0.38, to draw the uneven parallel lines for decoration.

Weekly Setups

I like to vary my weekly setups, just to keep things more interesting throughout the month. Similarly to my 2023 setup, I love to make use of internal tabs to help make my weeklies accessible and defined. For this month, I used the burgundy paper and my gold Uniball to make the tabs. Because of the way that the days fell this January, I opted to cut down my weeklies and make 4 setups (the first included Sunday 1st to Sunday 8th, while the fourth included Monday 23rd to Tuesday 31st).

The first weekly was a very simple setup with vertical columns for my daily and master task lists. I like to have a space for ongoing tasks to help me keep track of them without needing to assign them to a particular day. You will notice throughout this setup that I tend not to write out the days of the week in full- honestly, this is because I am too lazy to write them out so many times! No matter, I think the simplicity suits this theme anyway. The main decoration on this first week is the border around the header. I also included a place for notes at the top of the right-hand page, which I like to do when I have the space.

The second weekly set up is my personal favourite. It is inspired by the poster of the 1927 Fritz Lang film Metropolis. I used my craft knife to cut out a similar ‘cityscape’ to that of the poster from burgundy paper, which I cut in half, so that I could easily spread it across the two pages, and outlined in gold. The daily task lists are located within the black and white ‘rays’ emanating from the cityscape, which I also outlined in gold. The master task list is found on the lower right-hand side.

In the third weekly, I wanted to incorporate the triangular ‘capstone’ pattern often found in art deco designs. I created seven vertical boxes for my task lists, with overlapping gold and black lines, each topped with that ‘capstone’ pattern. If I were to draw these ‘capstones’ again, I would draw the black lines between the shapes before colouring them in gold, because I found that it was particularly difficult to ink on top of the gold Uniball. The header, master task list and notes section fit in nicely along the bottom.

The final weekly is probably my least favourite. I wish I had measured the white diamonds on the vertical borders as carefully as I did the gold ones (they were a bit of a last minute addition…). One of the key features of Art Deco design is symmetrical, perfect lines and geometric shapes, so I think it would have fit better with the theme to have all those shapes done more accurately. Ah, well. C’est la vie. For this weekly, I decided to shake it up and use horizontal boxes for my daily task lists.

January Review

At the end of every month, I like to make a review spread, in which I can record some favourites from the month, my completed projects, a memory and a photo. This month, as an extension of my tennis spread from my 2023 setup, I also included a space to write down the ATP Top 10 players, which I am hoping to use to track the changes throughout the year! All of this information (minus the photo) is located on the left-hand page. I have to admit, I don’t love the setup on this page- it feels less 1920s glam and more … evil jester? I’m not sure. However, I am very excited about the right-hand page. This is where the header and the photo will go. Obviously, because January is not over, I have not put a photo in yet, but the shell/fan patterned piece will serve as the ‘frame’ for the photo, which I will stick on over the top. I use my Instax mini link printer to print out a polaroid-style photo from my phone each month, which I then stick into my journal using double-sided tape. Honestly, I haven’t quite figured out how to get the right brightness on my photos yet, but I’m hoping I just need a little bit more practice with it! The black stripe on the right-hand side is mainly functional (though I think it looks quite nice too!)- it provides a ‘backdrop’ for the tabs of the weekly spreads, so that they look more intentional and less messy. This is similar to what I did in my 2023 setup, where I used the cherry blossom washi tape to offset the brown paper tabs.

And there we have it, my January ‘Great Gatsby with a Strictly Twist’ bullet journal. I hope you like it! I’ll be back in a few days with my February setup, so be on the lookout for that.

Gemma

xxx