In July, what better theme to choose for the height of summer but a nice, cool ocean style? The hard part of this month’s theme was narrowing down what I wanted to use. I love the ocean and the beach, and that’s definitely reflected in my stationery collection. Some of these items have been in my collection for three decades! It’s about time that they got used up.

I apologize if these images are tinted. I try to use natural lighting when I take my photos, but it’s wildfire season and the sky is hazy and orange from all the smoke. I try to color-correct them on my computer afterward but I’m not a photographer or a graphic designer! Just trying to do the best I can.

I also changed up my format again as I thought about how I use my reading journal. Instead of putting the list of books I read at the start of the month, I filled the righthand page with a quote/image. Then I saved a piece of paper where I wrote down all the books as I read them throughout the month and I pasted it onto the last page along with my monthly review stats. I think this made a better flow, so I’ll stick with it for now.

Materials: the dolphin notepad has been in my collection for a long time. It probably came from the Monterey Bay Aquarium or something like that. Some of the washi is from Simply Gilded and some came from Amazon. The big quote image is from Sweet Kawaii Design, along with some of the smaller stickers. The watercolor stickers are Happy Planner and the sticker flakes are from Daiso.

Here are all of the books I read in July. This is a new record for this year because I finished 11 books, read every day, and the total was 3,646 pages! Many of them were sequels to books I’ve read or by authors that I already liked. Two non-fiction for research, both tied into the Santa Cruz Witch Academy that I was finishing last month. And one anthology to try out some new authors.

Here is an example of one book that I finished. Since it’s non-fiction, I won’t do a full review here, but maybe you can read my thoughts in the picture below.

I hope that you enjoyed seeing my reading journal with this ocean theme. It was a lot of fun to create. In fact, I loved it so much that I wanted to do a related theme for August. The two best options to use items that I already had were either sharks or mermaids. Come back next week to see which one I decided on!