October Bullet Journal Ideas | Ideas for Setup & Spreads
The fun thing about the bullet journal is that every month, you can completely customize your journal to a theme of your choosing. While there are plenty of different themes to adhere to, you can also decorate your bullet journal to match the month, season, or upcoming holiday. In today’s blog post I’m going to be sharing October bullet journal ideas to help inspire you. And since Halloween is quickly approaching, you can rest assured that I’ll have some spooky inspiration for you!
What is a bullet journal?
The bullet journal was created by Ryder Carroll and is a customizable analog system designed to help organize your tasks, thoughts, and events in an efficient manner. While Ryder’s original set up is concise and focuses mainly on accomplishing tasks and getting things done, fans of the bullet journal have expanded on his original ideas to make the bullet journal a journaling system where you can really have fun and express your creativity.
Just look on social media sites like Youtube and Instagram. There are many hobby artists and journaling enthusiasts who take great pride every month to make their journal pages decorative and aesthetic. Keep reading to the end of the post for some ideas that you can incorporate into your own bullet journal spreads.
What should a beginner bullet journal include?
If you’re first starting out your bullet journal, here are some easy page ideas for your monthly spread to help you get started and stay organized. Remember that these are just suggestions. The fun thing about starting a bullet journal is that your monthly set up is completely customizable. Do what feels right for you and make it yours.
To start the new month, you will want to create an October cover page. On a typical cover page, you can write what month it is and add some illustrations that go along with your theme. But if you aren’t much of an artist, you can add any number of embellishments like washi tape, hand drawn designs, paper collage, stickers, scrap papers, and more. The possibilities are endless.
After you create your cover page, here are some ideas for what comes next:
- A monthly calendar, with lots of space to write for every day of the week
- A monthly habit tracker
- Monthly Goals
- A weekly spread (this is one of my favorite wats to get organized for a new week)
- Important dates tracker (for appointments, birthdays, and holidays)
- A gratitude log (Because it’s important to be thankful for the little things in life)
- A monthly log
- Meal Planning/Grocery Shopping
- Daily and weekly to-do list
- Self care
- Mood Tracker
- Quote page
- Reading Tracker
- Movie & TV Tracker
And so much more! You can customize your bullet journal by adding additional pages for the important things in your life. As an example, I like to write out my morning and evening routines so that I can check off the different tasks on my list as I get them done.
17 October Bullet Journal Spread Ideas
As I mentioned earlier, part of the fun of having a bullet journal is picking out a new theme every month. But if you’re out of ideas and don’t know what to do, keep it simple. Some great ideas have come from the seasons, upcoming holidays, weather, and more! Ex: A Halloween theme for October would be perfect, wouldn’t it?
Here are 17 spreads ideas to help get those creative juices flowing!
- Autumn Leaves (I love when the leaves change colors during the autumn months)
- Halloween Candy
- Haunted House
- Warm Beverages & Pumpkin Spice Lattes (a perfect match)
- Bright Orange Pumpkins
- Cozy Sweaters
- Hocus Pocus (Or really any Halloween movie!)
- Ghosts
- Witches & Spells
- Graveyard & Headstones (I could see this being spooky, or silly! The choice is yours)
- Apples (Because who doesn’t love Fall apple picking?)
- Hay and Scarecrows
- Zombies & The Walking Dead
- Candy Corn (This is very controversial, I know)
- Funny Halloween Costumes
- It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown
- Spooky Woods and Full Moon
Supplies to Enhance your October Spreads
As you work on your journal for the following weeks, you’ll need plenty of supplies. I think the following list of supplies would be perfect for fall and halloween bullet journal themes.
- Kraft paper
- Orange and black scrapbooking paper
- stickers
- washi tape
- crayola super tips (these are great for pumpkin doodles, halloween doodles, and more!)
- Your favorite pens and highlighters (I prefer no smear! I’ll share a post on my favorite pens soon)
- white gelly roll pen (Perfect for writing over dark papers)
- a scrap piece of paper
- candy wrappers
- fall leaves
- Orange sticky note
- newspaper scraps
- advertisements (I once made mail art from candy ads and it turned out really cool)
- free printables (sometimes creators will share these for free on their blogs and pinterest)
Journaling supplies don’t have to be an extra expense. A lot of these things are items that I already have on hand. But if you’re starting from scratch, a great place to buy cheap supplies is Dollar Tree. Or I’m sure you could also find what you need for less on Amazon.
Where to find a little inspiration for your October Bullet Journal Setup
Inspiration is everywhere! But in case you were looking for something more specific, here are places I looked for inspiration when brainstorming beautiful October themes.
- Magazines
- Youtube
- TV
- art stores
- my sticker stash
- my box of miscellaneous scrapbooking paper
I don’t spend a lot of time planning themes for my monthly pages. I spend a little bit of time thinking about it and then just go for it! The end result can vary but it feels good to get creative and get things down on the page.
Don’t Forget About Lettering!
Another thing I wanted to mention is that if you aren’t super into illustrating, you can also jazz up your pages with different lettering. There are lots of great tutorials online and I’ve been enjoying trying out different headings in my journal. I still don’t have my cursive script quite right, but I think I need to invest in a brush pen for that. See what I mean? The fun part of bullet journaling is getting to try out different things and see what you like!
Don’t be Too Hard On Yourself
I am a bit of a perfectionist and feel like everything on the page has to be perfect. When I make a mistake or something doesn’t look as good as I thought it would, I panic. But that’s silly. Journaling is supposed to be fun and we all make mistakes. So don’t be too hard on yourself when things don’t go your way. Just take a deep break and move on to different sections of your journal, until you’re ready to come back to the page you were working on.
In Conclusion
I hope you found today’s October bullet journal ideas helpful! A great way to come up with ideas for a new monthly spread is to have a quick brainstorm session. And that’s what this blog post is for me! As shown in some of the photos, I used these ideas to decorate my own monthly setup for this month.
The most important thing to remember is to make your bullet journal completely yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re just using pen and paper, or if you’re using different colors of crayola supertips to make things look pretty. The best way to get organized is just by getting started and developing your process along the way. The end results is completely up to you.
Thanks for reading!
If you enjoyed today’s blog post about October bullet journal themes, I have more bullet journal theme ideas that might inspire you. And if you’re not interested in monthly themes, you might enjoy my other posts on journaling.
xo Marian
