Planner Peek

Two things I love quite a lot are stationery and being organised. For this reason, my planner is one of my favourite things in the world. I've been thinking for a while of upgrading to an A5 planner instead of my current personal sized one, and I thought as soon I'm going to have a whole little family to organise, it would be the perfect time to take the plunge.

I've been lusting over more expensive planners, like the kikki.K, but I just couldn't justify it n the end, and decided I could deocrate the planner of my dreams with all the papercraft stuff I already had.

I took a trip to Paperchase after work one evening and walked out the proud owner of these goodies.

I got this lovely purple A5 planner, some stickers for super organising fun, and a mini hole punch which you can line up with the ring of a binder to make sure you are marking them correctly, which I thought would be handy. Papercahse stock their own A5 planners, but the range can be a bit hit or miss. What they have on the website and what they have in the shop is totally different, and even then there doesn't seem to be each much for the A5 as there is for other sizes. However, you can always buy other brand inserts once you have the planner, so it should be fine.

I spent a couple of evenings making this beauty as pretty as I wanted her to be, so I'm very happy to finally be showing her off.

First up here's the inside. The main reason I wanted a bigger planner is it usually comes with more pockets in the cover, especially the huge zipped pocket, so I was really happy when I opened this one up and discovered it had just what I wanted.

I decorated the inside cover with some stickers from the Lucky Dip Club, as well as some other cross stitch style ones from Paperchase. I also decided to pop a Disney giftcard I've had in my old planner for years in the clear window, so the princesses are peaking through.

In the zipped pocket I've got a ruler, and some stickers I've used throughout the planner, so I can do some planning on the go. I also attached this amazing little crochet hook keyring I got free in Simply Crochet this month to the zip, as i thought this was a safer place to get it rather than on my keys.

There's also another a large pocket you can't really see behind this section, which I'm currently storing some important maternity stuff in.

On the main divider for the front of my planner I wanted it to be super cute, so I used some stickers and some cut outs from magazine, as well as attaching some sticky notes to the bottom, which I can use throughout my planner. I also bought a really cute set of jelly highlighters from Asda, and just punched holes in the little pouch they came in so I could store them at the front of my planner. I covered the pouch in some veggie print tape from Paperchase to brighten it up.

For all the rest of the dividers, I pretty much did the same thing, covering them in washi tape, stickers, and magazine cut outs to make them a bit less plain.

So here are my main diary pages. I follow a lot of planner mad people on Instagram, and while I wanted my planner to look more organised, and be a bit prettier, I just don't have the time to sit down and basically scrapbook with my planner every week! I decided I would top each week's pages with washi tape cut into a little pointy shape, and add at least a sticker to each page to make it look more decorated. I've tried to use more stickers throughout, including my appointment ones I bought from Paperchase, sticky notes with reminders attached, stickers to keep the sticky notes in place, and bigger stickers at the top of the page to remind me of things I need to do that week like wash the bed sheets!

It's not quite the same level of things I see on Instagram and Pinterest, but it looks a lot more pretty than my old planner did, and allows me to use a lot of supplies I didn't use that often when I wasn't scrapbooking, like washi tape and stickers, as well as using up my huge supply of sticky notes. I did about a month or two worth of page decorating, so I'm always a little bit in advance of myself.

For a lot of the other pages through the planner, I decided to just pretty them up with either washi tape along the top, or some stickers. I bought a huge box of Hello Kitty stickers ages ago, so there's a lot of them right now.

Finally at the back of the planner there is another notebook, which is handy, and another pocket hidden behind it, which I'm using for invites and reminders. And of course, a Hello Kitty pen to top it all of.



I decided to buy some more washi tape from HEMA so I had some plainer stuff to use in my planner, as a lot of my tape just now is quite patterned. I also have some lovely posh tape I wanted to save just for scrapbooking, so I definitely wanted some cheaper stuff to go through every week. I also picked up some other papercraft goodies, as HEMA's stuff is just so lovely.

So there we go! My much more organised, totally huge planner is ready for use and I have to say, I'm totally loving it. It's just so lovely to open, look through, and use! And it's encouraging me to be extra organised so I'm really getting the full use out of it! Though I have had some people laugh at my for carting around such a massive planner!

Draw Once a Month - July

Well, this has been a bit of a break eh? My rubbish blogging schedule over the past couple of months has meant my list of New Year's Resolutions has slipped quite a bit, but I'm going to see how many I can still make a dent in, or even tick off, before the end of the year.

I sense next year with a new baby in the house, I probably won't have time to make a massive list, but I hope to still be able to craft where I can, and then blog when I finish things, and not stick to too much of a schedule (sort of what I've been doing for the past few months anyway).

This month I decided to draw something spooky, and went with Sam from the movie Trick R Treat. He's so cute! Here's a link to the original drawing.

Aww so cute, apart from like...all the blood!

This project is a step towards completing my New Year's List for 2015. You can check out my progress here.

Sticker Magnets

Today's craft took care of two things I really wanted to do, which is just great in my books.

The first was to use up some lovely stickers I had. Donald got me some amazing stickers as a present a little while ago, but they were so lovely I didn't know where to use them. Like any good stationery addict, I end up hording a lot of stuff because I don't want to use (read waste) it.

The second point was in our new house I have a craft room. It's beyond exciting, and it means I get to have a lovely crafty desk. I thought especially with a baby on the way, it would be a good idea to have all my crafty stuff tucked away. The back of my new desk is a magnectic board, and I've been looking for some new magnets for a while, but thought I would probably never find a nice enough set and I should just make some, perhaps out of Fimo or something.

Well last week I was reading some crafty blogs, and I came across someone (though I litetrally can't remember where I read it) saying they had a similar problem to me when it came to using amazing stickers, and how good an idea it was to turn them into magnets! I was sold, as it got rid of two of my problems at once.

I purchased 6 A4 sheets of magent sheet from eBay for £4.50, which I thought was awesome, and means I can make more in the future. Here are the stickers I used.

There were 6 that Donald got me, as well as 2 cute pigeon ones I got from work and wasn't sure how to use them.

They all fit on one sheet of the A4 magnet sheet, with not too much getting lost when I cut them out. Cutting them out was quite fiddly due to the shapes of the stickers, but the magnet sheet was super easy to cut.

And here they are all cut out! I managed to not slice off any bits I didn't mean to, which I was super proud of.

My desk now looks super cute, and I can start sticking things onto the backboard now I have magnets to do it with! I'm so happy these stickers have finally found a use, as they were far too cool to be sitting in a folder.

Crochet Bowl

I would regard myself as quite a tidy person. Donald however, isn't always the best at sticking to my version of tidy. Since we've moved house we have this big tall table thing in the living room that he dumps the contents of his pockets on to, and I forever want to make look nicer.

He recently bought himself a new change jar, to put all his coppers in, but he still uses the table for a key/chewing gum/rest of change dumping ground. I decided if I made him a little crochet basket for all his stuff, it would look cuter and keep the table that bit tidier.

I had trouble finding a crochet basket tutorial that would work with the yarn I had, as lots of them were super chunky, and I really didn't want to buy anymore just for such a small project. I eventually went with this one from JustBCrafty, as it said worsted weight yarn, and I figured my Caron Simply Soft in black would be a good replacement. As with most of these basket patterns, you're supposed to use cotton yarn, but I just used acrylic stuff.

This was super quick to whip up, and Donald is always pleased when I make him something crafty that's just for him. I went for black wool because most of the furniture in our living room is black, so it fitted well.

I'm not sure I finished it off right, as I gave up using a stitch marker halfway round as the black was messing with my eyes, so it might be a bit squint. I figure if I get some chunky yarn in the future, I can maybe make something better and perhaps bigger (as Donald's car keys are huge) but this is definitely doing the job for now. I do love the wee handles though, they are super cute!

Wedding Card Album

Another post in the series of "stuff I should have finished ages ago" is an album for our wedding cards. When we had our engagement party, I made an engagement card album, but everything since the wedding has sort of slipped (including my wedding Smashbook which still needs finished!).

This is our engagement album in case you missed it.

I knew I wanted to make something similar, but not exactly the same for our wedding card album. I also knew that we had about 5 times as many wedding cards, so it would need to be something a bit bigger to hold it together than just a metal ring like the engagement card album.

I saw a couple of albums on Pinterest tied together with twine, so I decided to go with that and just go with roughly what I did the first time around.

To make the covers, I cut up an old Ikea cardboard box and then covered them in scrapbooking paper. I went for purple and green as those were out wedding colours. I had also just got some photos printed from our wedding for an album we had and also to finish my Smashbook, so I used this cute one our photographer took of a Polaroid I took as the front cover. Then I just covered it in cute stickers and washi tape.Our wedding was woodland themed, so I tried to fit in a few cute animals!

I used some garden twine from my mum to tie the whole thing together. I figured this would be perfect as it fit in with our colour scheme, and I thought it would be a lot stronger than normal string or twine.

I'm not going to lie, it's totally huge, but it's so nice to have all the cards together and sorted. It also means I can now store the cards away, instead of having them sitting in a massive pile waiting for something to be done with them.

Michael Myers Cross Stitch

I love horror movies, and Halloween is definitely one of my favourites. I remember when I was younger, it was one of the ones my mum refused to let me watch because she got so freaked out by it. It's just so creepy, not really gory, and I love it. It's one of the series of horror films that I actually quite like a lot of the rubbish sequels too, especially H20!

Last year around Halloween I was on Pinterest looking at some horror type crafts and came across this pattern for a Michael Myers plastic canvas portrait. I thought it would look pretty cool in cross stitch.



The pin said it might be a cool idea to use glow in the dark stitches on the white bit, but I decided to use black aida and white glow in the dark thread and just stitch the face, as I thought it would look more spooky.

I've literally been working on this piece since I found the pin! I can't believe it's taken me since October, but it was always something I worked on when I didn't have anything else on the go (which isn't very often).

And here it is all framed.

I tried to get a photo that showed the glow in the dark-ness, but it was quite hard. This was the best I could get from shutting myself in the hall cupboard!



I used the DMC glow in the dark thread for this (E940), and it was nowhere near as bad to work with as some other "effects" thread are, so that was a relief. And I'm finally glad to have ticked something else off my "want to make" list!