How to set up a Whale theme on your Dingbats* Notebook 🐋

Renee Abisaad
Dingbats* Notebooks
4 min readFeb 14, 2019

Hello everyone! ♥

First of all I’d like to thank you so much for all the love you’ve showed to my January setup! You guys are the best!

Since it’s the World Whale Day on the 16th of February, I thought it would be very appropriate to go for a whale theme this month 🐳. The World Whale Day is a way to celebrate these extraordinary and very intelligent creatures as well as to raise awareness on the continuing need to protect them. There is a very inspiring video on Tedx Talks, on which Peggy Oki talks about how she founded the Origami Whales Project in order to raise awareness about commercial whaling in Japan, Norway and Iceland. I would highly recommend for you to watch it.

So, let’s see how I’ve setup my Dingbats* notebook for February.

The first page is, as always, my cover page for the month. I decided to add a little whale that looks really cute. Lately I’m enjoying adding little phrases or words next to my drawings. It’s my way to give the drawing more character and also to pass a message through it. So, since it’s February I thought it would be very appropriate for the little whale to ask: “Whale you be my Valentine?”. I also like to play with the words and instead of ‘will’ I wrote ‘whale’.

All through the setup I kept the colour palette very minimal and I used only blue, grey and black with a few touches of pink. As always you can see all the supplies I’ve used at the end of this post.

The next page is my monthly spread. I went back to my normal one-page grid that I find very easy to use. The size of each box is 4x5 squares. To keep up with the theme, I added the tale of a whale and used my Tombow markers as watercolours to get the shading right.

Moving on, this month I decided to use some individual trackers. I got inspired by the lovely AmandaRachLee on YouTube and added 6 boxes for the things I want to track this month. In January I started working out again more consistently, and I’m also on a very healthy diet. Therefore, it’s important for me to track things like: workout, healthy eating and my water consumption. I’m also planning to start a Patreon account and to add lots of new stickers on my Etsy Shop, so I wanted to track how many days I work on each one.

Of course I had to add another cute whale at the bottom of the page that is there to remind me to ‘dream big’.

Lastly, but not least, comes my weekly spread. I used one of the very first layouts that I liked to use 3 years ago in my bullet journal and that is still one of my favourites. On the left page there are 2 sections for each day of the week where I plan miscellaneous events and tasks for my work. On the right page, I added a to-do list for all the things I want to remind myself to do in those 7 days. Of course you can add any other section you want on that page, like meal planning, weather, weekly tracker etc. I love the little whale at the bottom of the page and I think he loves me too 😉🐳

So, this is my February setup with the whale theme. I hope that you liked it and that you’ve found it helpful and inspiring.

I’m wishing you all an amazing month, full of planning and organisation.

Christina x

SUPPLIES USED:

--

--