Things I Love Thursday: My New Blog Planner!

Today's "Thing I Love Thursday" is something I made: my new blog planner. :) I do a lot of my organizing and stuff online, but sometimes I just want pen and paper, you know? I'm pretty excited about it and even though it still needs some tweaking, I wanted to show it to y'all anyway! I got the idea, via Pinterest of course, from Infarrantly Creative (Beckie) and then made a few slight changes to mine.

(big ol' spoiler for that top book lol, sorry!)

(I apologize for the not great pictures, hopefully you can get the idea!)

I loved the idea of making it for my left-handed self (it's a special torture having to write in a right-handed person's spiral on a teeny-tiny right-handed person's desk in college!) and having the monthly calendar and then the weekly on the left. I also really liked how she had the calendar flip out, but I didn't really want to pay to get the spiraling done (since I wasn't sure I would keep up with it yet), so I decided to wing it and make my own version.

I took Beckie's page ideas and made my own from scratch, adjusting my boxes and titles for what I wanted: 4 Post Idea/Project boxes; Top 10 Tuesday; TILT; To Do. Added a cute background and printed. I printed enough for the end of the year, just to see how I like it. (If you like my pages, I would be more than happy to email them to you!)

Then I picked up a few folders at Target one day (folders are soooo cheap you guys, I wanted to buy like 50!!): one in a dark blue, heavy plastic with brads and pockets; one green regular, cheap folder with brads and pockets; and one pretty one with owls all over it with pockets that alas, I couldn't use because it didn't have brads. :( Then I sat down and thought about what I was doing for about 45 minutes, bugging my sister to help brainstorm with me. She refused. I finally figured it out on my own. :)

For the monthly calendar pages, I wanted them to flip out to the right, but still be able to remove them and keep them each month. So I took the green folder and glued it to the inside edge of the blue folder. I had to trim a little bit off the left side and top to make it fit inside, then I glued about 1/2 an inch after the brads to the inside of the folder. Then I folded the right side backwards over the back of the blue folder, cut it to about 1 1/2 inches and glued that to the back of the folder (with hot glue) to make it more secure. I wanted to use the owl folder on the outside to cover up that ugly, but it wouldn't work. :( So now I have my flip out calendar with folders behind it (with my cute Pixar stamps in the back!). And I used pretty tape to make the pockets and brads more secure.

The front pocket has my to-buy list printed out for easy usage or to give to my family at Christmas. :) The right side shows the back of the weekly sheets and that list is the books that I still need to review for the year. Eep.

Like I said, it's not totally perfect. The size is a little too big to carry around, I'd like to either find half-sized folders (do they make those?) or go get it spiraled next time. Also, I realized I need more boxes or lines on the back for extra ideas, to-buys, etc. And I need to make my Top 10 box bigger, I write too big lol. Overall, I'm really happy with it though. It's already helped me stay more focused and organized. This is obviously not for everybody, but maybe some of you will like it and get inspired to make your own! I'd love to see it if you do. Or if you have a different way to stay organized, tell me about it! My sis is trying to get back on track with her blog (Dash of Dazzle) starting in September and she wasn't crazy about the hand-written planner, so she's doing hers all in her phone calendar. She even made her a pretty leopard banner lol.