Saturday, March 26, 2016

Happy Planner Stickers help keep me organized

It's been a busy time for me, very busy. Lately I've been on a planning kick. I wanted to start organizing my life, and getting into a routine, keeping track of my exercise, days I work, doctor's appointments and more. Last year I bought an Erin Condren Life Planner and I loved it. It was easy to use, and fun to decorate. But I really didn't like how it was divided into Morning, Afternoon and Evening, especially when my life just isn't organized that way. I needed more flexibility.

Enter planner decorating. After investigating and joining a few Facebook planner groups I discovered this world of decorating your planner using stickers! What a fantastic concept! I could now update my Erin Condren and cover over the headers I didn't like. And the added bonus was that I was documenting my life in a pretty way, almost like merging my planner with a scrapbook. 

After a while, Me & My Big Ideas launched their new Happy Planner and I fell in love. The layout was very similar to the Erin Condren, but without the titles on the headers. But what drew me in was the discbound system. Instead of having to buy clips or fold extra papers into envelopes in the back, with The Happy Planner, I could punch my papers and put them right into the week I needed them. I already had a punch from Levenger that worked with discbound systems, and it worked for my Happy Planner too.

I started out decorating my THP with free stickers which I found on a number of great sites. All I needed to do was print onto sticker paper, or the more economical full sheet label paper, and cut out what I wanted. In some cases, I could download a Studio file for the Silhouette Cameo and cut them out that way. The community was very generous. But I still couldn't find exactly what I was looking for, so I decided to make my own, and people liked them. So because I already had an Etsy shop and had uploaded some of my older digital scrapbook design kits, I decided to launch a new section, the Printable Stickers. The one thing I think that sets mine apart is the fact that I have a sticker for each day of the week to track my sleep, mood and pain. I found a lot of people looking for that, so it's pretty much a staple on my sticker sheets, with few exceptions. Here are a few examples of what I've done.








It's been a lot of fun making these using some of my older digital scrapbooking kits that I've designed. Now I'm using my Happy Planner more often, especially organizing things like our upcoming move to the West Coast, it's been easier to get organized, and keep on track of things. I hope you enjoy these. I'll be dropping some freebies here in the future as well from time to time. And if you have suggestions or requests for particular stickers, please leave a comment and I'll get to them bit by bit.

Have an amazing weekend everyone!