Explorations in Planners, Pens, Art and Other Obsessions
As usual, please let me know if there are bugs or errors in the templates, or if download links are broken – I’ll do my best to fix and reload them as soon as I can.
I plan to post on here more regularly in 2017, so stay tuned for more activity on that front too.
Enjoy!!
Like THIS AFTERNOON/EARLY EVENING soon. They’re not ready yet, because I need to upload everything to MediaFire and update the blog links and stuff. But check back by early this evening cause they should be ready!!!
I wanted to thank everyone for their very helpful and well thought out comments, I greatly appreciate them. (Well, there was ONE that rankled, but I’m trying to let it go.) I am so pleased that you all like this planner so much, even when I was frustrated and life got in the way with these, you are the reason I couldn’t let the Pretty Pretty Planner die.
So after much deliberation I have decided not to put them up for sale this year, and just post them for download as usual. I am adding new usage policy information EVERYWHERE I can think of on my website, and have a new Usage/Printing Info txt file I’m including with the downloads.
I’m also going to make it my goal to explore a more professional design program in 2017, perhaps Adobe InDesign. Designing these templates in Word 2010 has been getting more and more frustrating – one minute everything will look perfect, and the next my tables are all messed up and truncated, and I haven’t even touched anything! And the bigger the Word files get, the fussier they seem. So there’s been some creative cursing at my computer this weekend haha. But I think the Pretty Pretty Planner has evolved past the limitations of Word. I’ve also heard there are scripts I can use in InDesign that would automatically populate all my dates, which would be AMAZING because that is the biggest time-suck when updating these.
So, that is the plan for 2017. Come back in a few hours and you can download away.
Thanks for sticking with me folks. ♥
Hi everyone.
I know I have been getting a lot of questions lately on the 2017 version of the Pretty Pretty Planner, and whether this blog is dead or not.
It’s not dead – I’m still here. I know I haven’t been posting anything really, and sorry about that. 2016, like with everything else it seems, has been a tough year. But I was actually moving along getting the 2017 planners ready for release. I so love that you guys love them, and believe me, I read all the comments even if I can’t keep up and respond.
The problem is, I found out someone is reselling my planners that I make free for personal use (thanks to a kind FYI in the comments), and it’s bummed me out. Like BIG time. So now I’m pondering what to do to add some kind of copyright notice to my templates, or even take it all the way to Etsy and start charging for downloads. And honestly just haven’t had time to make these big decisions yet.
I’m really frustrated and disappointed, and trying to figure out how to move forward or whether to scrap them all completely.
So yes. There will probably be 2017 planner versions, I have half of them done already. Okay, no I don’t want to scrap everything, not really. But I need to figure out what to do next first before I can post them.
Not too long ago a friend gifted me with a sampler set of six Peerless Watercolors. What are they? Forget about tube or pan watercolor paints – Peerless Watercolors are these awesome PAPER-BASED paints that when activated with water perform like any other watercolors.
Here is the 6-color sampler set my friend gave me:
Peerless Watercolors are available online from Amazon and other retailers. I was lucky enough to find them in person this weekend when I was visiting a local store, Two Hands Paperie in Boulder Colorado. I found the Peerless Watercolor Papers Bonus Pack (Small), a set of 40 different 2×2″ square watercolor papers.
The bonus pack was arranged in order, as was described on the packaging – important because the individual color swatches aren’t labeled. Once I got it home, I was so excited to show them off and test them I got them all mixed up, and couldn’t put them in that same order again.
They’re really fun, vivid bright watercolors. And so travel-friendly and portable! So I have this laminated “dashboard” for my fauxdori / midori traveler’s notebook planner. I bought it from ToDie4Planning on Etsy. Dashboards are used to hold sticky notes, washi tape, images, basically a more solid surface for whatever you want to use them for. I picked this one because it’s a glittery seafoam green color called “mermaid” on the outside (just plain white on the inside) – a perfect match for my planner cover.
Problem is, I really didn’t use it. Like, at all. It was basically pretty but pointless, sitting there in my planner. So I was posting pics of my new Peerless Watercolors this weekend to Instagram, and in looking at the hashtag noticed a couple of people had cut up the sheets into little pieces and made traveling palettes for their planners. And I thought, AHA!! That’s a perfect use for this dashboard – it’s a sturdy plastic base for these paints.
I assembled some supplies. The watercolors, the dashboard, a composite wooden board I use to clip drawing paper to, a waterbrush, glue, scissors.
First, I cut a sheet of watercolor paper into two pieces the same size as each half of the dashboard. This was to be my surface, because not only did I want to glue the Peerless pieces to them, I also wanted to dab a swatch of paint next to each one. And the laminated surface of the dashboard as is wouldn’t work for that at all. I rounded the corners of the outside edges, and glued them to the inside of the dashboard.
It’s a little lumpy looking now, but that won’t be noticeable by the time I’m done.
So then I had to decide what size pieces of watercolor to arrange in my palette. I had 40 colors total in the Bonus Pack, so knew I needed 20 per side, and needed a decent spot next to each to dab the actual color with the waterbrush. I cut a 1/2″ strip off each square, and then cut that into a 1″ piece – so each piece ended up being 1/2″ x 1″.
I was going to start numbering each mini piece to the larger square, hence the white numbers in this pic, but then figured eh, screw it. They were already hopelessly mixed up anyways!
Arranging the colors. The thought was two columns of 10 colors per side. Problem was, all the handling of these pieces gets your fingers mega messy! And then the white watercolor paper I was going to glue to started to get all messy too. I had to move all the pieces off of my base and get them in the order I wanted and erase all the marks they left on my paper.
So then I started gluing one by one, struggling to remember to glue the pretty painted side down, so that the actual transparent watercolor side was available for me to use.
Problem is, the glue kinda seeped out over the edges of each piece as I glued it – and I soon learned that if I wiped it off, it either got glue all over the top, which I didn’t want, or would get color over the white spaces. Take a look at these close-ups.
The next step was to take my waterbrush and make a sample of each color next to each Peerless Watercolor piece.
I’m going to take some onion skin/Tomoe River Paper and cut a piece to fit over the watercolor pieces so they don’t rub against each other. Hopefully the glue sticks!! So far they haven’t popped off yet. I slid the old dashboard / new watercolor palette through an elastic in my fauxdori cover – my plan is to leave it as a standalone insert in the planner, and not piggyback it around any other refill – I want to see both sides of the paints in one glance. Here it is in my planner.
I had extra pieces of Peerless Watercolors left over, 1/2″ x 1″ because of those strips from each square cut in half. So I thought I’d make another portable palette to use with my various sketchbooks. But I didn’t have any extra laminated “dashboards” left over to use as my base.
I did have some extra plastic cutting mats thought, the result of my plastic Circa planner cover experiments. Most of my sketchbooks are 8.5″ x 5.5″, so I cut a sheet into a 8.25″ x 5.25″ piece, rounded the edges, and cut a piece of watercolor paper to glue to it, following the same process as above. Then glued down the pieces and made swatches.
Problem is, the watercolor paper top wouldn’t stick to the plastic cutting board base no matter how much glue I used! It’s already popped off. I have glue dots holding it on for the time being, but don’t think those will last very long – that’s what experimenting is for though! I’ll just slide this sheet into my other sketchbooks when I’m not using the planner palette.
Meanwhile, some other links on Peerless Watercolors:
If you have downloaded the Junior 2016 BW version, there was an error with the date sequence on one page in January. The files have been corrected and re-uploaded, so please download again!
A weekly horizontal planner version of the Pretty Pretty Planner was requested last year. Here’s what I came up with for 2016. Only Junior size right now. Head on over to the Pretty Pretty Planner page to download!
I get a lot of questions about why the dates on my Junior-sized weekly printables seem out of sequence. It’s not just a matter of putting a month in order by date on letter size paper, printing on both sides, and then cutting in half. If you did that, all of your dates would be out of order once you actually tried to assemble them in your planner. So imagine opening the Word document you just downloaded for the Pretty Pretty Planner. Zoom out so that each month or week will be a two-page spread, so you will see both pages of a month or week at one time when the notebook is opened.
What you expect to see is the first page, which in my printables is usually the goals/todo’s page, followed by the first week in January, then the second week in January, etc. But instead, if you open my Junior weekly layout and zoom out so that you see two landscape-oriented pages at a time, it will look like this:
The very first “planner” page in the download, the first half of the first page, is actually the first part of the SECOND week, January 4th, 5th and 6th. This is deliberate, and not a mistake in order for the right month or week to start on the back side of the last month.
For example, both the weekly and monthly two-page layouts follow this logic (when I say page, I mean PLANNER page, once printed and cut in half):
1st Half: 2nd Half:
Planner Page 4 Planner Page 1 = Word/PDF page 1
Planner Page 2 Planner Page 3 = Word/PDF page 2
Planner Page 8 Planner Page 5 = Word/PDF page 3
Planner Page 6 Planner Page 7 = Word/PDF page 4
After awhile, it kind of has a two-steps-forward, one-step-back feel. If you have the Word doc zoomed out to 2 pages, imagine four different “planner” pages. Start your sequence with planner page 2, then go to planner page 3 and planner page 4 on the Word doc page 2, and then back to planner page 1 at the very beginning of page 1. Keep thinking of them as sets of two-page spreads. The second half of the week started in position 1 continues in position 2 in the next two page spread. Confused yet? Look at these screenshots and hopefully that will help.
So this is why they may appear to be all out of order but actually are in the order they need to be to print successfully.
