Pumped Up Planner Pages

I have always been a paper-planner girl.  Ever since my days of carrying an assignment book around in my high school backpack, I have put pen to paper to create lists, schedules, and reminders to keep life running as smoothly as possible.  I love my iPhone for making calls, taking photos, and updating Facebook, but I'll just never be an Evernote girl!

Until I read The Artistic Mother by Shona Cole, it never occurred to me to beautify my planner pages or make them anything other than plain and utilitarian.  In one of her projects, Shona guides us through the process of creating beautiful backgrounds and art action plans in the form of lists or calendars, using stamps, oil pastels, punches, and printed words to decorate the pages.

From there, I watched online as Julie Fei-Fan Balzer and Effy Wild created gorgeous daily art journal entries.  Then along came The Documented Life Project, integrating art journaling techniques with a daily planner.  I also watched as a number of the bloggers I read and follow created their own self-designed planner pages to sell in their Etsy shops. 

Finally, I began a Pinterest board called Daily/Weekly Plan Books, and pinned all sorts of fun and gorgeous planner pages in Martha Stewart binders, Filofax and Hobonichi planners, Moleskine journals, and Erin Condren Life Planners.

I made my first effort to beautify my planner pages as I was getting ready for 2014, when I added washi tape and stickers to brighten up the pages.  I didn't change the way I used the book, though, so I ended with my same old scrawl and cross outs surrounded by pretty tapes and stickers.  Not much to look at by the end of the year.

This year, after soaking in the inspiration from my pin board, I'm off to a better start.  I still need my planner to function as a workhorse...I need it for my week's menu plan, doctor's appointments, and things my girls need to take to school with them.  But I am using stickers and sticky notes to record some of these things, and using open spaces for pretty tapes, interesting quotes, and brief notes about the day.

It is still an all-utilitarian planner for me, because I can't afford to give up that functionality.  But it has color and interest that makes me smile when I look back over the pages, and enough information to serve as almost a little diary of some of my days.

See the flowing-haired woman on her stationary bike up there?  I typed "woman riding stationary bike" into Yahoo Images to get a reference picture to sketch for my spin class appointment.

The next time I went to spin class (above), I drew my water bottle resting on the handlebars!  It's kind of fun to look back over my pages and see the little sketches and other "fancies" that brighten up the pages.

When the week begins, my planner is a plain and lonely-looking space:

Sometime next week, I'll show you what this week's spread ends up looking like once it's gotten full use!