Happy New Year everyone !  I hope you have now fully recovered from all the festivities and now thinking of the new year ahead.

I looked at my goals last year , and to be honest I have only part achieved them.

Upon reflection , I think this year has gone too fast for me and that I have been so caught up in doing a lot of things and forgot to take a breath.

It has been so full on with life, work , studies and it has been emotionally hard too.

So this year ,  My word of the year is … SIMPLIFY.

I feel that keeping things simple and just take each day as it comes will provide me the breather I need to appreciate the other things in life and focus on the things that I wanted to do since last year.

Well that is the thought.

I have used the December kit – Beautiful beginnings to create my first journal page of the year,

I am hoping that every time I open my journal , the page will remind me to slow things down, think positively and focus on my word of the year.

This year , I am using the same journal that I have started last year.  There are still a lot of pages left for another year so why not?

Starting off the page

After choosing where I am creating my layout , I have covered the pages with the papers that was included in the kit.

It was hard to choose which one to use as everything was so pretty!

I have left a bit of the original page exposed on the right hand side of the page to keep something neutral on to the page.

I wanted to use big ( ish) numbers and alpha stickers for my page. So I used a few from my stash.

As the sticker book is an old , I didn’t have one colour for what I needed.

Luckily, the kit colour theme is pastels and the mix match of colours has worked.

The pastel coloured journal cards are going to be perfect for journaling.  So I  glued them on to the page.

Oh , and I also added one of the lace stickers at the top and bottom of the page.

Decorating the page

I went to town decorating my page!

The kit has all this positive quotes, and the cut apart embellishment card was just awesome and I used all of it !

I used a few stickers from an old sticker book that I had to decorate the page too.

I stuck some positive quotes from the sticker sheet provided around the page so that everywhere I look there is a positive reminder for me.

One of the elements in the zine came very handy too as it had all the positive things to do.

So I included it on the page.

Lastly , I drew on a faux stitching around the boxes to decorate and make them stand out from the page.

The page is now ready for to journal on and write my goals and intentions for the year.

I am hoping that this year will be more productive than last year and be able to breathe and enjoy the simple things in let at the same time.

So, have you created your 2026 page and thought of your word of the year?

Well, this is it for me for now… but before I end this blog…

I would like to wish you all the best of 2026!

Lots of crafty hugs,

Sheryll