Welcome to another Make it Monday Blog Circle! Today we are helping you GET ORGANIZED!
You may have arrived here from Melissa’s blog but if not, no worries, I’ll give you another link at the bottom of this post and you can follow it until you circle back to me! Melissa is showing us how to keep a collection of photos together to scrap later with Photoshop Elements Organizer.
Are you wondering what the big deal is with the latest craze in Scrapbooking – The Planner? Today I am sharing my thoughts, ideas and some creative inspiration for you.
A disclaimer to start off with: I’m not sure I would be so “tuned into” this latest off-shoot of paper crafting if it weren’t for my friend Cara Vincens of The Hooting Pirate. She asked me to take a look at her class, Practically Perfect Planners, before it went live and ever since then I have had planners on the brain! I am sure that after reading this post you will want to register for her class too and I’m sorry to say that registration is now closed. However, do sign up for her email list because I have it on good authority that she will be re-running this class in the future (probably as a self-paced type workshop)!
So why a planner?
I consider myself a fairly organized person. I can usually put my hands on just about any item in my house within a few minutes. If it takes longer than that, it’s usually because one of my children (or my husband) has not returned it to its designated home. I’m sure you all have no idea what that’s like, right?! As a family we have a large Family Calendar hanging in the kitchen and any and all kids or parent activities are to be put on the calendar as soon as they arise. If it’s not on the calendar it doesn’t happen! Or something like that.
Since I got an iPhone last year I have been enjoying the calendar app and sometimes I forget to transfer items to the Master Calendar and then things can (and have) fall apart. But for the most part, as a family we are organized. Our kids get to where they need to be, when they need to be there and my husband and I are able to coordinate the whole who’s-driving-who-to-what dance, that every household does, with minimal stumbles.
My business life is another matter altogether!
Here is what I am currently using to keep track of all my creative ideas and PAC responsibilities.
The larger pink notebook is for notes from all the various PAC meetings I go to. I’m the PAC Secretary so I take my meeting minutes in here and then transfer them into a Word document later. It needs more pockets but it works. The small one is for my business ideas. I love that I can take it in my purse with ease. It’s got a couple pockets at the front where I can tuck things in. I also love the spiral binding as it means I can fold the page right over and continue writing on the front and back side. It doesn’t have dividers so if I need to find something later I have to flip through the whole book to find the page I’m looking for. Not super convenient.
This little gem was a total score! I work part time at Pier1 Imports and we used to sell these. It’s a mouse pad with tear away pages. For quite a long time I would plan out my blogging assignments on this mouse pad. It was always at hand and really quick and easy to see what I needed to work on next. Now that I am not on any design teams I find I use it more for quick notes. But I still love having something so close to hand that I can write on. We’ve discontinued them at Pier1 but I did see them at Chapters just the other day so if I decide to start using it again, I know where I can find more.
Speaking of Chapters, I received a Chapters Gift Card at Christmas time so I put it to good use. You may have seen this photo in my Flickr feed recently …
And here’s what I have done so far to adapt them to my needs.
This lovely teal number is “leather” with a spiral bound notebook inside. I love that it’s spiral bound – already a favourite with me – and I love that it’s removable so once it’s full I can just replace the book and keep the beautiful teal cover! It did not come with dividers but not to worry. My friend Cara to the rescue again! She filmed three introductory videos before her class launched to explain the process a bit more and give some valuable tips for customizing planners. I put two of those tips into practice with my new gorgeous notebook.
The first tip was to add a custom made divider using card stock or patterned paper and paper clips! Ingenious!! I also added this FREE printable from Simple Stories (get it HERE) as a permanent reminder. The colours worked too – bonus!
On the back of that same divider I created a pocket (another tip from Cara) to keep one of the notebooks from the 3-pack that I purchased.
This one says Dream and I plan to take this with me when I’m out so I can always be dreaming of new ideas for my business and jotting them down here!
My OCD side was made happy with these labelled tabs. Yes, I own a label maker! The better questions here should be, why don’t you?! LOL!
So now my organized side is super happy to have a brand new, sectioned, labelled, pretty home for all things dry and business-y. Now to work on a physical CALENDAR planner … but that is on it’s way in the form of a Simple Stories planner that I picked up from Scrapbook Steals. You can check them out here. Currently they are having a President’s Sale on past Steals. All past Steals are marked down PLUS you can use coupon code PRES10 to save an extra $10 off orders of $50 or more.
And since I am in a Planner frame of mind, I wanted to share another source of inspiration with you. Christy Tomlinson. She’s a mixed media and scrapbooking artist extraordinaire and purely by accident I stumbled onto her new obsession … you guessed it … PLANNERS! She’s got a couple of great videos on her YouTube Channel showing how she customizes planners. She uses planners from kikki.K which are really cute and come in a variety of sizes.
Ok, now you’re off to Lisa’s blog where she also shows you a peek inside her Practically Perfect Planner!
Have a happy and organized Monday everyone!
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