September Happy Planner & A5 Designs

Welcome to September! In Illinois it typically means cooler days are ahead. Before you know it, it’ll be Fall. Since it is technically still Summer here, I wasn’t ready to do any Fall spreads even though I do love the colors.

With the new month I’m ready to re-engage with the things I need to get done. Looking back on August, there were several items that I carried over from week to week that didn’t get accomplished that should have been. Although I did get a lot done, I had more chill time than normal, which is usually not my thing. So, it’s back to being productive for me. ✅

To start off the month, I continued with the Dashboard layout….it’s still my recent favorite layout. In fact, I was planning on picking up a 2021 Dashboard Happy Planner when they’re released, however I was able to catch a preview of them and I have a feeling I’m going to have to design my own pages next year. The planners that are going to be available all have color in them and I want something completely neutral. I’ve even written to the The Happy Planner in the past and requested neutral planners. They did oblige with the horizontal layout eventually, but all of the upcoming Dashboard planners have some color in the them, which means I’ll need to cover it with stickers and I find that is limiting. So for 2021, I may be designing my own pages. We’ll see.

This is the first spread of the month:

Over the weekend I picked up this Happy Planner sticker book that’s filled with lots of sarcastic quotes. Since I can relate to so many of them, I’m already having fun with it. The font throughout it is cute as well. I’m trying to cut back on the sticker books I buy, because I’m working on making my own stickers, but I couldn’t resist this one. 🤪

For my A5 planner pages, I used a few of the sarcastic stickers on them as well. I’m just going to call it the sarcastic book, because I don’t see an actual name on the book and they only refer to it as an ‘accessory’ book, which is the same as several other similar books.

An Instagram follower reached out to me last week and asked me if I was selling my work planner sheets. I’m currently not selling them, but hope to one day soon. There are some printing logistics that need to be figured out first…. but, that got me thinking that I’ve never posted what the planner sheets look like without all the stickers, so here’s a pic:

Let me know if you would be interested in it as well…

I also just finished creating a Fitness/Health page. Fitness and Health tracking tends to be very personal because data that is critical to one person is unimportant to another, so I just designed a sheet with what I needed. I can create other layouts in the future for others. I mentioned before in this post that I tried to use the Happy Planner Fitness Planner, but it just wasn’t enough space for me. I tend to track quite a bit and it was too restrictive in terms of space. I do however, think it’s a great format if you only want to log a few metrics. Check it out if you want to look at a few of my designed Happy Planner Fitness pages. Anyway, a daily sheet works best for me. In the past (before the Happy Planner Fitness planner), I used a small spiral notebook which gave me enough room to track everything.  The downside was that I had to re-create the format of the page every day. Sooooo, I made a planner page that will fit in my A5 for fitness and health tracking. I may need to tweak it as I use it, but it’s pretty close to what I was using on notebook paper.  It gives me space for everything I want to log and I’ll use the box for quote/motivational stickers or jotting down a reminder of ‘why’ I’m on a quest for better health and fitness. I know when I remind myself, in writing, about my goals on a daily basis, I’m WAY more successful at achieving them. This is what it looks like:

If you read my August post, you already know that I had a beautiful leather Filofax planner cover that I returned because I didn’t care for the color. While I wait for my new one to arrive I am using the clear one in the photos. I’ve had a few people ask me about it so I’ll post the link here. If you want more info on it you can refer back to my August post, where I wrote more about it.

Well, it’s only the first week of the month and this is already a long blog post. 😁 Here are my work planner pages for this week:

For the 2nd week of the month I was looking to switch things up a bit so I made some design changes to the layout on the left side of my planner. No coffee quote this week, but I added in some color coordinated focus boxes. I was just giddy with the way it turned out and I absolutely LOVE the colors in the floral stickers. I think this is the third time I’ve used these particular florals and I never grow (no pun intended..lol) tired of them. 😍 I used them in a horizontal layout as well. If horizontal is your jam, check out this post. I’d have to say out of all of the planner pages I’ve created so far, this one is my absolute favorite!!

I’m also posting a close up of the quote and of the sticker books I used this week. I’ve had a few people ask what sticker books I use for a spread and although I add them to my Instagram posts, I haven’t been putting that photo here. It’s easy enough to do so I’ll include them going forward.

For my work daily A5 sheets this week it’s a short week with the holiday….yay! I also received confirmation that the planner I ordered on Etsy has shipped! I talked about it in this post if your interested in hearing about why I decided to have one made. It’s coming from Ukraine so I don’t expect it to get here until the end of the month. I’m just happy to have seen the shipping notice. I ordered it on August 1st and today is the 7th of September. I was starting to wonder if I was every going to get it. 😳

For the 3rd week of the month I went back to a peachy-pink color theme. The black stencil styled florals are always fun and versatile. They also make a design pop when you want to keep the color simple.

For my daily pages this week, my favorite is the one with the light blue flowers. Was popular on Instagram as well.

For the last weeks of the month I simply didn’t have the time or the desire to design my Happy Planner pages. I was able to set up my work planner sheets, but only because I did it ahead of time the week before.

The last two weeks of the month I didn’t do any planning because I was spending all my extra time caring for my 11 year old dog, Sarge who’s health was rapidly declining. On the 25th we decided to help him over the rainbow bridge. It was, by far, the absolute saddest day of my life. I am deeply devoted to my dogs and losing him was gut-wrenchingly hard. We had also had to say goodbye to our 8 year old female Doberman, Ellie just 10 months earlier who also had some serious health issues. So when Sarge passed away, the house was empty of pets. My heart was numb and that emptiness was so depressing. I cried every day for weeks and lost all interest in planning for awhile.

Sarge:

Ellie: