January Journalling

By Lauren Ingham

This is my first post as a new member of the Lollipop Box Creative Team for 2024. I am so excited to start this year with a new challenge! Some of you may recognize my name from the Lollipop chat group over on Facebook, I often pop up there with posts organising the advent swap for Christmas in September (sorry).

Create with simplicity:

As soon as I saw this kit, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it. I wanted to create something that would act as a reset button: strip everything back to basics and simplicity! What I mean by this is journaling some goals and plans for 2024 and best-bits of 2023.

We all have our reasons for creating using whatever method we choose: for memory keeping, using up old photos or to improve your mental health. I am a big believer that there are no rules to our hobby and no two people’s journals will be the same. However: This month I pose you a challenge; sort of a promise to yourself; that you will take a few minutes out of your week for you: to document your feelings for 2024,  something to either round off your 2023 journalling or start a fresh journal for the new year. I struggle every January to motivate myself, as people often had amazing Christmas festivities (boo 999 life). So I came up with this journal spread to get my head focussed and prepared for 2024.

Word of the year

As you can see with my photographs I used this months kit to document my 2024 ‘word of the year’ that Lisa has shared in previous years. The word of the year prompt card is included in the kit zine, so it was really easy to include this in this spread. My word of the year is BREATHE. I suffer with anxiety and often the smallest of things can quickly spiral out of control and consume me. Focussing on this word, I’m going to try and BREATHE before allowing the smallest of worries to consume me, and to let things happen naturally. I also wanted to journal about my favourite moments from 2023, as well as the small, achievable goals I am going to focus on this year. I don’t like using the term ‘new year’s resolution’ as it puts too much pressure on me and I set myself up to fail. I’d rather have 5 small achievable goals that are easy to stick to.

Journalling doesn’t always have to be the ‘big’ momentous occasions like I used to think. I find a lot more joy documenting the little things – which I think this is why I used to enjoy documenting the Christmas period so much. It was the everyday stuff that you tend to forget, until you look back on your journal in months or years to come. One of my goals for 2024 which I wrote on the little pull-out is to start to create in my new weekly journal, rather than waiting for the ‘big moments’ to document. This is something I became guilty of this year! Even if I feel like I have nothing to journal about, I am going to focus on getting something down about that week and I urge you to do the same. It’s great to look back on in the future at the little things that brought you joy, especially the bits that don’t stick in your brain when you think back to that period.

Sometimes if you’re feeling a overwhelmed, it is beneficial to have a little rant or brain-dump in a journal to get things off your chest. You could do this straight into your journal as a sort of bullet journal page, or use scrap paper tears to create a journal page like I have below. I certainly find it less daunting to journal this way than a full book of lined pages to fill!

If you’re stuck but want to still fill out your weekly spread,  write down your worries, thoughts and feelings, what emotions do you have right now and why? What are your plans for the rest of the day or week? Journal about it! You never know, it could bring you much needed uplift for January and clear your mind for the following week.

Happy New year!

*the majority of elements used to create this spread were included in the December Kit. There are a handful of stickers were from my own sticker collection, as well as previous month’s kits. E.g 2023 sticker and ‘believe in yourself’ phrase sticker were from last year’s December kit (yes, I am a hoarder).

To see what’s included in the December (YAY) kit box, head to Lisa’s youtube channel : its only paper – YouTube