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.

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.

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.