How to create a template for Filofax personal size pages

I know that many of you in the planner community are very creative and love making your own pages, stickers, dividers, dashboards etc. as do I. So I thought I'd record a short video to show you how to set up a personal size template for Filofax or other planners of an equivalent size in Microsoft Word.

I hope you find it helpful. Would love to see what you make.

As a side note, I created the video using a great free online tool called screenr - I would definitely recommend it. 

Disney planner dashboard/dividers

I've been working on prettying up my planner recently and I thought a disney theme would look great in my gold Kikki K. 

So I put together some of my favourite Disney quotes and made some dashboards/dividers.

Disney quotes

The full set are available as a digital downlaod in my Etsy store.

2015 month on 2 pages A4/A5 diary download

I've just finished jazzing up a month on 2 pages diary for my A5 filofax next year. I downloaded a free basic template from My Life All in One Place and adapted it with fonts and colours of my choice.

2015 month on 2 pages diary

If you would like to use my template, feel free to download it here (in docx file format) or here (in pdf).

I'm going to use a month on 2 pages to practice my doodling, lettering and drawing. I plan to put something in each day to represent either what I did that day or any special ocassions that I would like reminding of.

Learning the art of hand lettering

A new obsession of mine is hand lettering. I have been inspired since joining the online Filofax community and seeing posts of beautifully decorated planner pages with gorgeous styles of writing. Particular inspirations of mine on Instagram are kikkiknetter and craftyniftydoer. They post photos of their planner pages and the writing on them looks amazing. I can only dream of being half as good as them one day. 

Instagram @craftyniftydoer

For other hopefull beginners out there I thought I'd share the first part of my journey with you. I started off with the best free teaching resource - Youtube. It seems like the starting point for me needed to be learning how to write cursively. At school I was taught how to write "joined-up", but over the years my hand-writing has evolved into a semi-joined-up scrawl. I watched a few videos showing how to do the alphabet cursively, and although each had a slightly different slant on doing things, they all had similarities. By watching a variety of these videos, notepad and pen in hand and practising along with them, I started to get the feel of cursive handwriting. My absolute favourite channel for practising is Loops and Tails which has a minute long video on each letter (upper and lower case). On their website, they also have free printable worksheets and exercise drills you can work through.

Tip: I can't remember where I saw this, but someone said if you want to make your writing look more like you've used a calligraphy pen, thicken up the downward strokes. I have been working on this technique and I quite like it. 

I also stumbled across a video on accenting, which talks you through different ways to frame, boarder and accent your hand-writing. I copied all of these out into my notepad too. I find it really handy to have a record of everything I see in my notepad so I can look back on it and use it. Saves trying to hunt down the specific videos. 

This is pretty much where I am up to right now. I keep practising my crusive lettering, the more I do it, I hope the more smooth it will look. At the moment I am having to think about it and therefore write it slowly which means it can look quite shaky. Once I have mastered this, I will start looking at other fonts and different styles of writing to learn.

I'm writing out people's names, phrases, random words that come into my head, anyting to practise really. A little untidy, but something I worked on today...

Part of my problem above with the untidyness is probably the black pen I used. It is a Uniball signo gelstick 0.7 that I had laying around at home. It's quite nice to write with, but not so good for thickening the letters as the nib is not precise enough.

One day, maybe my planner will look like a work of art. I can dream.