Close To My Heart

Saturday, January 2, 2016

New Year New Planner

Happy New Year everyone!

With the new year comes a new planner. And yes, this year I've been on some kind of a planner craze.  I've been an Erin Condren fan for the last 2 years, but this year, seeing the surge of planners out there, I thought I'd venture out and try something else. After reading how other people use different planners for specific purposes, I decided I'll try that this year. My EC planner will still be the mother of all planners, but now that I have Simple Stories Carpe Diem planner too, I think I shall use this mostly for the home. Part of my New Year's Resolution is to cook more home cooked meals this year,   spend more time baking with my daughter, and just keep up with house chores.

Because the Simple Stories Carpe Diem planner does not come with dates, I thought I'd make mine a little extra special. Yes I could've penciled in the dates or use those date dots, but since I want to dress up this planner, I thought I'd go the extra mile and actually make it more interesting. The EC planner comes dates, and I never for the last 2 year thought of decorating it, until I got the Carpe Diem planner.

This is how my "dashboard" looks like. The Carpe Diem planner is A5 in size, and I love that it's a ring binder instead of the coil one like EC. This allows me to add more pages and inserts. The flexibility alone is a big plus. The leather is also of great quality, and given all the adds I've already put it, it seems to be holding up very well. I also love the fabric black and white polka dot lining! As you can see on the left it has 4 slots of varying depth so you can insert whatever you like. I use it to insert sticky tabs. Underneath it is also a slot for bigger inserts, and as you can see I have more sticky tabs. I used a spare insert from La-La Land's dies (I happen to have it lying around my table), and thought it holds my sticky tabs really well, that way they won't clutter my dashboard insert, and I won't lose them. I love how I can easily carry everything with me now and have so many sticky design options.



Here's a look at the monthly view, all of which I picked a design or designed myself images from the Silhouette store. I used the Print and Cut feature for all these date stickers. I decided to also do some random dates just to break up the monotonous pattern of the dates. For February I tried using Heidi Swapp Minc machine and ran these heart date stickers using Rose Gold foil. I am a bit disappointed by how it turned out. Not sure if it's the size of the stickers or what, but most of them came out with black bubbles.


The next few months are the same, I picked images and colored it in with patterns or colors, and just added dates over it.

 




This way my planner won't look boring. I hardly get to put much on the month view anyway since the boxes are too small, so instead of cramming my agenda on the month view, I will utilize most of the weekly view, hence I thought why not just decorate it! As you can see I tried to put a theme on each month, and for months that really have not much significance, I went with something simple like a teddy bear, or leaves to signify fall.

I'll post some more pictures of how I did the insides or weekly view. Just different image designs really. I've also created some tab dividers of my own. I'll share that in my next post.

Happy New Year!

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