 My name is Laura and this is my channel Laura's Little Library and today's video is my April bullet journal spread. So of course I'm gonna start off by lighting the candle to set the atmosphere and make the apartment just smell a little nicer and seem a little brighter. I ended up getting some new pens for my bullet journal as my regular pen died partway through the last one and I didn't have any other pens in the house that didn't like horrendously bleed through or just stop working. So I went and bought new bell pens. For April's theme I decided to do a beehive or just be hexagonal spring spread. I chose to do this spread because like I said it's a very spring vibes spread and so I thought it was very fitting for the season because at the beginning of the month it's supposed to be a little warmer and all the snow should hopefully be melted but also because this is my husband Brennan's birthday month and he is a beekeeper and he doesn't currently have any bees but he has in the past and he will in the future much to my dismay. So this is also kind of an honor of him and his birthday with all the bees. So again the title page is a little plain but I like it. And our first spread is the calendar spread. I always have this as my first spread just so it can kind of capture everything in the month. I can write all of my notes of read-a-gones happening and when books are coming out and planning for videos when to start blogs etc so forth and on and on. So I always start and I like my calendar to take up two pages so I can have plenty of space on each day to write as many things as I need to and not have it be super cramped and super messy and I always have a note section on the left hand side as well just for anything either for a next month's bill at journal or something more month long or just in general ideas that aren't necessarily assigned to a day or week. So then next I have my TBR page and I thought it'd be very fun to do play off of a TBR jar so a lot of people do TBR jars for read-a-thons or just their regular month-to-month TBR and jars of honey are pretty popular and well known so I decided to do a TBR jar of honey so I have my six jars all with varying levels of honey both to make it interesting but also to put top priorities with the fullest jar and then lower priorities with the lowest jar just to kind of have less pressure because I am a mood reader so it's very unlikely that I will read all of these books if any so I thought it would be very fun to have different levels of honey in each of the TBR jars I don't like to do more than six months books for the month as I said I'm a mood reader and doing too many books can be daunting and then it puts me in a slump but not having any books doesn't really help give me a direction when I am doing an audiobook and I don't really have as much choice to mood read with audiobooks then I changed it up and decided to have all of my read-a-thon specific pages after the TBR rather than later on in the spread I think it helps to see what books are for what read-a-thon specifically and if I have books for a TBR for a read-a-thon that aren't on my general TBR then I can have them all together so I can see all the books I want to read even if it's not all on one page so this first read-a-thon here is the spring fling-a-ween this is hosted by Olivia read-a-lotte I didn't put in any of the information at the moment I was gonna do it later but then the second read-a-thon I'm participating in is actually the one that I am hosting the continue-a-thon it's happening from April 2 to 15 and it's all about continuing or finishing series I will link my announcement video also my TBR video has already gone up for it so this is just the official page for that read-a-thon why did I put it second when it's happening first I don't know probably because it's all I'm thinking about my spare time so when I open my bullet journal I need to see the other read-a-thon so I don't forget about it and I can plan for it maybe or maybe it just happened that way so I always have the prompts my TBR the books that I read and then if there are social media prompts or badges or whatever else that is unique to that read-a-thon and then I have it with the books read spread after that and then this way I can see at first my TBR then the read-a-thons and then what books I read again to have them close to the read-a-thon so I read them for but also close to my TBR so I can still compare I decided to do a little bee house like what beekeepers have what my husband had so this was pretty fun and I can always add more drawers if I read more books than lines I have on the hive although I highly doubt that I've been having some pretty good reading months but I never want to jinx it and then next up I have my rankings page this is a page that is purely for the last day of the month and I am very excited for when I've completed a year of this so that I can actually go back and see my top three ranking books of each month and it will hopefully help me decide what my favorite book of the year was and then also the worst book of the month so I've got flowers as the top I've got that little honey wand thingy as the second one in case you couldn't tell what that was because my art skills are abysmal and then some good more hexagons for the third best and then I decided to do a traditional beehive for the worst because I am actually afraid of bees I very much appreciate what they do for the planet and I love them but from a distance I don't actually like them so beehives are some of these scariest things to me and so that's why it is the worst the symbol for the worst book that month I have my books to buy spread this is another one that I do every month that is very particular to my situation I have a $20 book budget every month and so I have a whole spread devoted to what books I want to buy this month next month and the month after just as brainstorming and then I've already moved on to the other spread which is just for the month of April so this is keeping track of what books are coming out in the second half of the year this is for a video idea but also just for me to keep track of like what books are coming out again I wanted to spread close to my what books I want to buy so I can see what's coming out in the next couple months do I want to buy it over something backlisted that I wanted to buy so this is kind of getting back into my more structured boxy type of spread but because it's like twice a year thing it doesn't need to be super important but it will be very used on the next page starts all of my social media tracking so my first social media that I plan and track for is YouTube and I decided to do a much less structured layout than what I've done in the past rather than doing a whole bunch of boxes I thought it'd be more fun and more thematic to just kind of have it be more open space so I've got a flower with little bees to accent and some grass around the brainstorming area but every leaf I'm going to write in the date of the video and then around the leaf I'm going to write my video idea and on the next page it's a little more structured but I still tried to keep it thematic for my Instagram I post three times a week and so I have three sunflowers for every week and that's just where I brainstorm I also do keep track of growth on all of my platforms just as I try new things do new things how does that affect my growth and the people that I talk to and the friends that I make because that is ultimately what this is all about for me but so YouTube and Instagram are fairly similar let me tell you doing these sunflowers the yellow all around the black pen it made me afraid for my marker a little bit and it was very tedious like it's sped up so it doesn't look that bad but man as I was doing it I was like oh my word I could I should have just done different colors rather than just doing a whole field of sunflowers those sunflowers would be fun and a great way to brighten the page even though it turns out this is a very light colored spread and I love then finally I actually combined Twitter and took talk to one page because both of them previously had their own independent page and there's just a lot of negative space nothing was being used so I felt like it was a waste so I decided to put them on one page and just make them look nice and again let there be a little more open space for all of my brainstorming rather than try and cram everything into boxes so it just doesn't always work for me so here's the final flip-through I have to say I am very satisfied with how this turned out I was able to use a stencil for a lot of hexagons which is why it looks as neat as it is I love all the colors it's very bright and very springy and very dramatic and it just makes me happy and it's probably one of the cleanest spreads I've ever had so hopefully I can keep this artistic momentum going and all my future spreads but we'll see about that but thank you so much for watching this video if you liked it please give it a thumbs up let me know in the comments below if you keep a bullet journal what some of your themes are maybe if you have any suggestions of what I should do for May otherwise I post on Sundays and Wednesday so feel free to subscribe and hit the bell to be notified when I do upload both times of those weeks and I also have as you may know a bunch of bookish social media linked down below so feel free to follow me there and I will most likely follow you back and we can be friends so until I see you in the next video I wish you happy reading