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.

Designer stationery at Quill London

I fell in love with Kate Spade when I went to New York a couple of years ago and saw the beautiful purses and bags in Bloomingdales. Since then, the brand has grown increasingly popular over this side of the pond, especially in one particular area that I am interested in - stationery.

If you are part of any of the online planning communities, the must have planners along with Filofaxes and Kikki Ks are the Kate Spade planners. Yes, I do really want one and no I haven't got one. Realistically, I use my planner for work and I need an A5 planner, so unless KS start producing an A5 number, I am unlikely to splash out the prices that these planners are currently commanding.

Anyway, I digress. Also in the planner community there is a huge buzz around stationery, particularly at the moment the Kate Spade paperclips. Last year I bought the "expletives set" from eBay. This is a set of 12 gold symbols - !?&$#*. I used them to sit and look pretty in my gold Kikki K personal planner. Now a lot of people seem to be loving the gold bow paper clips, so I wanted to get my hands on some of them too.

In searching I came across the site Quill London which is an online store for what seems to be mostly high end, beautiful stationery. Whilst browsing, I discovered they had the acrylic pen pot from the Kate Spade range which I've had my eye on for a while, along with the stapler and tape dispenser.

So I placed an order for the pen pot, bow paperclips and some gold pens on Tuesday night and it arrived beautifully packaged on Friday. Each item in the box was individually wrapped in tissue paper and sealed with gold stickers. Nice packaging is important don't you think?! There was also a hand written thank you note. I got free postage as my order came to over £40.

I am absolutely loving my Kate Spade pot. It has a rose gold base inside with the phrase "a stroke on genius" and a cork base so it wont scratch my desk. The pens and paper clips are a lovely addition too.

Now I'm going to be saving for the stapler and tape dispenser!

If you want to buy any designer stationery for yourself or as a gift, then I thoroughly recommend you check out Quill London.

This is not a sponsored post, I just really love the products and the service.

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.

DIY Christmas present tags

Last week I stumbled across the idea somewhere online of using your old Christmas cards to make into present tags for next year.

So last night, armed with my trimmer and corner punch I sat down and made these...

What do you think? It's amazing what a rounded corner can do.

Next year I plan to wrap most of my presents with plain brown parcel paper and then use these tags and some ribbons to brighten them up.

Making beautiful photo collages for your blog

I'm a follwer of The Beauty Department and oh my how lovely their photo collages always look. I wondered if there was a specific bit of software that would do this for you so did a bit of research. It soon became clear that this is just the work of some very creative people.

So I did a bit more research to try and find out what software bloggers use to help thiscreative flare. It turns out that most people us one version of Photoshop or another. I don't own Photoshop but do hower have an open source (free) image editing software called GIMP (download here). I've done many a photo edit in GIMP so thought I'd have a go at my first ever collage.

This post I came across on The Beautiful Mess helped a lot too.

Now bare in mind this was never someting I made to share so it's rather basic and I need to experiment a bit more to get my own style. But I'm quite impressed and it didn't even take very long.

What do you think?

1. Miss Selfridge £26 2. New Look £24.99 3. Next £28

The basic idea is to use good quality images, make sure they don't have a background (or remove it if they do), select a couple of decent fonts and use full stops (periods) to point towards the products.

Now I know I'm along way off from perfecting this, but it was just a trial and I wanted to share the findings of my research on this.

I'll work on it and hopefully one day my collages will be good enough to officially use in my blog.

Make your own meal planner

I don't know about you, but I was getting into a bit of a rut where every evening it was a struggle to decide what to cook for dinner. Then on some occasions I decided what to have only to look in the refrigerator and realise that I didn't have that food in.

On browsing Pinterest one day, I discovered people had designed all types of menu boards to help plan their meal for the week.  Such as...

  

or

These inspired me to have a go at creating my own.

I liked the idea of using mini pegs to pin the meals so I ordered some from eBay. I then started to look for something I could make into a board. Then a Graze box popped through my door and after eating my tasty snacks I kept the box with the thought of finding a nice decorative paper to cover it. 

The box was left laying around for a couple of weeks until I had another brain wave. Inside the graze boxes there are pictures. So I thought I'd see if I could turn the box inside out and eliminate the need to cover it.

The boxes are put together by folding, so I carefully undid it like so...

Note this is a different box to the one I used on the finished product.

Then I put it back together inside out, and put a little tape on the side to hold it together. Next I took my pegs and wrote the days of the week on them, then glued them on the box with PVA evenly spaced out.

Then I took some other brown card (more recycled packaging) and made two little pockets to put the removable food cards in. I did debate over how many pockets to have and what catergories to use. I saw one on Pinterest that had "favs" and "quick" which I really liked the idea of, but then I knew I'd end up confusing myself if a meal fitted into both fav and quick! So I decided to go for meals that I have in and meals that I don't.Again I used PVA to glue these on.

Then I cut out the cards to write the meals on from an old cereal box. And fially here is the finished meal planner! Not the neatest or most professional looking, but it does the job and has got me out of the meal decision quandry every day.