Notebooks , Planners, and a review

I love notebooks, journals, and planners of every kind. When I cleaned out my oldest daughter’s room after she left for college, I found an entire box of cute notebooks I had given her over the years! Most of them had one or two pages written on, but that was it. Still, I think that she may have picked up that particular obsession from me—not too long ago I was out shopping with her when she picked up a new journal for herself!

 

Anyway. I’m a journal keeper. I’ve kept one since I was 8 years old starting with the tiny key-locked diaries that only had a couple of lines per day. As a homeschooling mom, a planner was practically glued to my hands for years. This one, as a matter of fact:

I actually left this at a hotel one year on our vacation. Needless to say, we backtracked to get it. I always told my kids it was my brain, and I would be lost without it!  Eventually, I got an iPhone. It’s lot easier to carry an iPhone than that planner, and so now iCalendar is my best friend. (And, yes, I do worry about losing all that information to some glitch, and I’ve tried to keep a hard-copy planner as a back-up, but it’s just not doable for me! It takes too much effort for my lazy personality!)

As a quilter, I have two grid notebooks full of quilting plans. I love my colored pencils and graph paper! My children have grown up knowing that to touch Mom’s pencils was to enter very dangerous territory! (Same with my crayons!)

 

This January, I bought one of the new quilting planners on the market. I thought I would love it.

It’s a beautiful book. But I don’t run a business, and I have my iPhone calendar for my personal events. So I have not used the calendar part of the planner at all. Nor have I used the designer pages. They are beautiful and fun to flip through, but I have been quilting for a very long time and already have too many projects on my plate. None of these appealed to me enough to cause me to add another! The only pages I’ve used so far are the project planning pages.

And honestly, I like my gridded notebook pages more. The little grid in the corner of these pages is just not big enough. (And way too small to color in!) I also found myself making my own kind of notes instead of following their categories.

 

It is nice to have it bound and pretty, but it was a pretty expensive option. So, once these pages are filled, I will go back to my gridded notebooks. Here’s one with 100 pages for under $5. I could even upgrade and get a journal-like one such as this from Amazon for ten bucks.

 

And now, here I am starting a blog. Guess what I have found? You got it—all kinds of websites telling me I need to have an “editorial” calendar. There’s also sites that will sell me Blog Planners with gorgeous pages just begging to be written in! I’ve printed out a few free samples, but I think I’ve learned my lesson, and I won’t be dishing out big bucks for a fancy blogging planner. When I first started this journey, I began carrying this little notebook around with me.

I’ve been writing down notes and ideas in it. Even some calendaring. I don’t need all the other fancy-schmancy pages. I’m not planning on using this blog to make money, and I don’t think I’m going to be the next Bonnie Hunter or Lori Holt. So, I’ll stick to Grumpy Cat. He makes me smile.

 

What are your favorite ways to record your life journey?

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