This post has been in the works for a couple of days, but I was hoping to wait until I had finished this project before posting. Nothing fancy this time; and the final project definitely looks home-made, but I love it for its imperfection.
Most people I know use some sort of day planner/diary/calendar, and as 2010 approached, I decided I probably should get back to using one again. The trouble is, I have a habit of using one for about a month and getting somewhat bored of it. At that point, I typically lose it, and since I can't be bothered using it anyway, that tends to be it for me until next year when I vow it'll all be different.
A friend of mine has been making her own for years now so as a gift, we made one for each other. For the first time in many years, I actually spent an entire year using a day planner! Not only that, but it was the same one all year... so it stood to reason that of course I needed a home-made diary/day planner for 2011.
I decided I wanted to make a few changes to my 2010 edition; starting with more colourful pages. I spent a couple of hours cutting coloured papers into rectangles each just under a quarter of the page in size. I think I ended up with about 400 rectangles in 15 different colours/shades; and once that was done I started gluing each in place and dating them as I went. Some of the colours were too dark to write on, so I used a combination of fancy edged white paper (for the day's content) and a thin strip of correction tape for the date/birthday/holiday marker.
At this stage, I still had a number of pages spare. I'd deliberately left three blank at the very start (for the following pages: cover, personal information & important phone numbers), but I also had quite a few at the back. Some of these I knew I wanted for notes, but I certainly didn't need so many. After a bit of thought I decided the perfect additions were pages for inspirational quotes & messages, affirmations, and photo pages dedicated to people who are supporting me (sometimes actively, and sometimes just by being a presence in my life) in achieving my constructive goals and dreams. I also included a couple of pages for some of the life-changingly-amazing experiences I had in 2010.
In the end, I merged personal information & important numbers onto the same page and popped inspirations into the front; starting at the very back page you go through affirmations, giraffe feeding and experiencing the snow, before happening upon several pages of my wonderful friends across the globe.
My 'through the months' pages were still missing something, though, so I went back and decorated each new month with a miniature version of my two nieces & nephew, and another 8 people who have made a tremendous positive impact on my life; plus a photo of something associated with one friend.of whom I couldn't use a personal photo. Here's an example of a new month page, using the image of Ezekiel:
With the rest of the diary finished, I discovered why my friend had been using pens to divide each day's page... my day planner was so full at the very beginning of the year that it was more than twice the size of last year's! I finished off my diary by using some elastic thread, a button and a pair of pretty beads to create a 'tie' to hold it closed.
I'll let you know at the end of the year how well it has survived!
