January 2025 Calendar Journal and WOTY: Focus

Hi Friends!

Here is my first journal page for 2025.  It has just been TOO COLD upstairs and away from the stove to even contemplate visiting the art room (ie spare bedroom). It’s been -6C for a couple of days and everything is frozen solid outside – it’s not so much warmer inside but I have had the woodstove on every day. The kittens (Miss Lily and Mr G) have not moved far from the stove and both are sleeping on the bed at night for warmth.  Miss P is healing up nicely and is still in the house, and doesn’t seem to want to go outside – who can blame her in this weather!  She is in the cold part of the house though as she needs to be separated from the other two.  She has lots of warm beds, and a hot water bottle to keep her cosy. I am still on crutches until my appointment at the end of the month but I am hopeful that I will be able to do without them soon – it’s been almost a year after all!

So because of this cold and because I clearly wasn’t getting anything done, I brought my journal downstairs and did some drawing in it in front of the fire and used various pens to colour it, all of which was easy to do from the sofa.  My word of the year for 2025 is FOCUS as I seem to need to focus on quite a few important things in order to have any chance of achieving them this year.

Today’s art . . .

I decorated the page with lots of dots so this is also a page to share for Mia’s theme of Dots on Art Journal Journey You will be able to find dots in many places – pink dots all over the background, purple dots on the books, white dots on the FOCUS word, pink dot “cheeks” on all of the cats, button “dots” on the sofa, bubble “dots” in the goldfish bowl, and so on.

This is the usual recycled A4 bullet journal I have repurposed as my calendar journal.  This was taken upstairs after I had sketched out the basics as the light was better up there.  Then I went back downstairs to the warmest room for the next stage which was going over all the pencil lines that I wanted to keep using a black waterproof pen before starting on the colour.

Here’s a closer look at some of the details…
Three kitties in winter clothing swinging from the 2025 sign.

Three kitties and a Blackbird climbing on the 2025 sign.

Two kitties playing on the sofa, and doing what cats do naturally – scratch up the furniture – you can see various scratches on the sofa back.  More Blackbirds and some toy mice.  I have been feeding the birds in the garden and I have three male Blackbirds but no females (my neighbour’s cat killed one on Xmas day), also some sparrows, one Robin and a Song Thrush. I have moved the feeding station to the table in the hope that they will be more protected from marauding naughty cats.  I was able to take some photos during the week and will share them next week.

I got a new book for Xmas and so I have been practising drawing a cat burglar.  This one is carrying off the contents of 2024 in a big sack – you can see on the outside he also has my crutches!   He is standing on a stack of books on which is written some of the things I was able to achieve last year despite being on the dreaded crutches or perhaps because of being on them and not being able to do some of the usual things I normally have to do when not injured.

I managed to read/listen to 181 books.  I will say more about that in my next post but it was a bumper reading year with some truly awesome books.
I was able to crochet three new blankets.  I’ve been really grateful for them all in this cold weather.
And somehow I was able to create 386 papercraft projects!!!   This seems like an incredible number but a lot of them were very small, and include journal pages, cards, ICADs, 100 day project and so on.   I have not quite finished the December daily challenges that I was participating in due to lack of time (December flies by so fast doesn’t it?) so they are not included, and I will keep working on them meanwhile as they are in three separate journals and I would like to complete them.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.   As always, thanks for reading and Happy journalling!Ingredients
recycled A4 bullet journal, pencil, waterproof black pen, Pitt artist pens, gel pens, Posca paint pens, Ecoline markers, white gel pen,

Challenges

Art Journal Journey – Dots