Cara Vincens's Blog Posts

09.12.18

Happy September planner girls! It’s Cara here, I’m a planner lover and a school supply addict! September is such a fun time of year. That back to school season is fantastic with it’s fresh starts, sharp pencils and crisp new notebooks. It’s a time to set new goals or learn something new, even if you aren’t going back to school and you don’t have children going back either. 

I’ve used the School Rocks collection to decorate my TN to help me plan my month, week and day and to plan in those goals as well. This collection is perfect for us school or office supply addicts! First off, I decorated my goal page, this page has lots of space for lists (I’m addicted to lists too!) and notes. 

The lists are labelled for you but you can use the stickers from the Planner Basics Sticker Tablet to cover them with list titles that suit you best. I covered up ‘Notes’ with a pencil label sticker and added ‘September’ so that I can use the notes page as a general ideas and brainstorming place as I plan the month. The big pencil looks cute with the stack of pencils running down the side of the page.

I got ambitious and fussy cut 7 paperclips and then 7 pushpins to use as my checklists. I find fussy cutting relaxing but if you don’t like it, you can use some of the small stickers from the Planner Basics tablet instead. 

Onto to the monthly spread. I mixed stickers from the September page of the Seasons Sticker Tablet and the Cardstock Stickers from the School Rocks collection.

I don’t tend to write a lot in the monthly spread so I can afford to put the large, full stickers in my boxes. My six children go back to school on 3 different days (yes, that’s annoying, but it’s also allows me to focus more on each child on their special day) so I marked those with big stickers. I also marked the first day of autumn with a sticker. With the paper airplanes I mimicked the dashed trails from the paper airplane card from the cut apart paper. I used small round navy number stickers from the Number Sticker tablet for the days.

Moving on to the weekly spread, there were lots of ‘First Day of School’ stickers to choose from so I was able to use 2 in this spread.

I combined stickers from the collection, the tablets and fussy cut bits from the papers to complete this page. I cut strips of patterned papers to trim the top and bottom of the pages.

For the daily spread, I simply decorated around the edges of the pages, because I like lots of space to write, I try to keep my to-do list to a minimum each day, but I’ll use the space for notes and brainstorming too. 

The schedule side of the page however will be completely full! Lots to do in a day with 6 children going back to school!

If you’d like to see how I made these pages, you can find a process video on my YouTube channel here: The Hooting Pirate YouTube Channel - Are you addicted to school supplies? Do you love a fresh notebook? Then the School Rocks collection is perfect for you :D

Supplies
08.14.18

Hi it’s Cara today, along with my son Cedric, my ‘Lil’ Dude’. We’ve been planning and recording some summer memories.

What I love best about traveler’s notebooks is that they can be anything you want them to be. A notebook, a planner, a sketchbook or journal. You could use yours as a memory planner or a bullet journal or simple just to decorate. Or, my favourite, a mix of any of these!

For this project I wanted to mix a bit of planning with a bit of memory keeping and I want to do this project with my children. I used a blank insert and we will have some bucket list type pages and some more scrapbooking/memory planner pages and anything else the children would like to add. At the end of the summer I hope to have a nice document of what we did during our school holidays.

Today, I was creating with my youngest, Cedric. He’s 5 and is obsessed with dinosaurs, I knew I would have to share my dinos from the Lil’ Dude collection, but that’s ok, there was lots to go around and I’m a nice mom :D

I asked him what he wanted to do during his holidays and wrote down his answers. basically, all dinosaurs all day! 

While all his brothers and sister were away at camp I took him to a dinosaur museum in Germany. He was in heaven! I used a few photos on this spread and of course some dinos! 

The big kids were still away so the two of us sat down to craft together. I created this page and let him have at it with my left over dino stickers. I did hide them from him for awhile so I could make my last project, which you can see here.

This is what he came up with, he even drew his own T-Rex and added a couple of dogs and a robot for good measure. I think he’s caught the TN bug now :D

Supplies
07.29.18

Hi, it’s Cara here today with your regular dose of traveler’s notebook fun! And what fun it is today! The new TN inserts arrived at my door and I just couldn’t wait to test them out. 

I have covered a few of the inserts with the Dream Big collection and set up my Cream Dot Traveler’s Notebook with that collection as well. You can see that process in my YouTube video. 

Today, however, I’ve used the AMAZING Lil' Dude collection. I have 5 sons and so this line really makes me giddy. I’m in trouble though because my dinosaur loving 5 year old discovered my stickers yesterday. I need to hide them a bit better, don’t worry, I’ll share my stickers with him… just not very many ;)

I scattered in some stickers from those fab Sticker tablets. I’m so in love with these tablets, they are so versatile and there are so many colours.

For the monthly spread, I went minimal. I used a few of the square stickers from the 4x6 sticker pack to fill in the extra squares at the beginning and end of the month. 

I layered other stickers from the collection and mixed up flag numbers from the numbers sticker tablet, using colours that matched the Lil Dude colours. 

I took the scripty ‘August’ sticker from the Seasons Tablet and simply covered up the plain August that was there. I layered a few stickers along the top for a border and that was it! I was able to keep this spread pretty minimal.

Next up is the weekly! Again, I used numbers from the Numbers tablet and since this week spans July and August I chose different colours for each month. That is the only thing that I used that wasn’t in the Lil' Dude collection. 

I only used one really boy-ish image, the dino skeleton.  The collection is FULL of versatile stickers and die cuts. It may look like there are only robots and dinos at first glance, but as you can see from my spread there are tonnes of things you can use in your planner without it looking masculine at all!

Lots of layers here again, because they are my favourite! Layers are a great thing to try if you feel like yours stickers tend to float around on your planner spreads. 

I cut up the white and black diagonal striped box sticker and used a bunch of little strips around the page. I love this look, it’s almost like mini washi. Speaking of washi, I just realised I didn’t use any washi this time, wow that has to be a first!

 

Last but definitely not least is the daily insert. Today is Sunday and usually I don’t have a lot to plan on Sundays, so I really enjoy decorating my Sunday’s because less activities to schedule, means more room for stickers! 

Along with Lil' Dude, I use some of the new stamps and coloured them in with watercolour. Did you notice I stamped the planner backwards? Oops!! 

I also mixed in quite a few of the Sticker Tablets in the daily spread. The date alone comes from two different ones, Numbers and Tabs. I used icons from the Calendar Sticker Tablet for bullets for my to-do list. I added flags from the Planner Basics Sticker Tablet for my to-do list header, ‘here’s the plan’ covers ‘notes’ so that I can use this space to plan the upcoming week and I added a couple to the top left page to repeat the banner sticker on the right hand page. And a few extra stars from Planner Basics in the same colours as the Lil Dude collection polish off the spread.

Its super easy to match pretty much any collection from Simple Stories with these generic tablets because they have so many colours included.

Again lots of layers of fun stuff from the collection. One car sticker fits the theme of my day… driving kids to camp. 

I trimmed bits from the black and white striped border on the big cardstock sticker sheet. The entire thing is a bit overwhelming for these little planner pages, but cut up it’s perfect!! I’ve got one strip down the left side, then two thin strips to section off parts of the page. One at the top left below the date and the other on the bottom right to section off my plans for the rest of the week.

Of course I couldn’t resist making a couple of planner clips with the chipboard pieces, my favourite thing to do! 

I hope I’ve inspired you use these fantastic boy themed products in your planner today! You can check out my process video for these spread on my YouTube channel.

Happy planning!

Supplies

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