I’ve been using meal planner sheets for a couple of years now, with varied success.  The goal is to have an intentional dinner instead of just assembling something easy when I get home.  Cute planners are good commitment devices, so I whipped one up in Powerpoint.

You can download the PDF in an assortment of colors.

Other cute ones I rotate through (and took design inspiration from):

• meal planner from futuregirl
• menu planner from olliebird
• daily menu by A Print A Day
• menu planners from Super Organiser Mum
• selection from Fab N’ Free
• weekly menu planner from Bugaboo
• the weekly chore sheet from The Project Girl

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Someone posted this handpunched letter poster by Anna Farkas to Pinterest the other day and it lit a little crafting fire.  I decided to try to make an “M” for Mark and Maitreya.  The idea is to make it for Valentine’s Day, but non-holiday-specific enough that we can hang it up year round.  Instead of the lacy pattern they created, I decided to go geometric to make it more unisex too.

It was shockingly easy.  First, I printed out a giant letter m, using a bold font with a chunky line.  This one is Arial Black 450 pt bold, printed in outline to save ink.  Then I cut out the inside of the letter to make a stencil.

To help keep the punch pattern even, I used a page of isometric graph paper from my paper pack.  I played around with a few different patterns before settling on this one.  The key is that the pattern needs to be dense enough to fill out the letter and create good edges.  My first try was too sparse, and you couldn’t tell what it was.

(graph paper template after punching)

The pattern was easy enough to follow that I didn’t draw it in first, but you could do that for something more complicated.  Use a bit of masking tape to keep the stencil on the graph paper on the real paper.

I used a cork tile as a nice soft base to punch into.  The paper is from a thick watercolor pad.  In a moment of cleverness, I decided to try my embroidery punch needles, since they have a comfortable holder, make rather large holes, and I have two size needles.  It worked!  Until the smaller needle bent in half :/  I was able to use a pin for the rest of it, with an improvised masking tape wad to make it easier to hold.  If I’d had any sense, I would’ve used a pushpin.

Anyway, punch away at the pattern, staying inside the boundaries of the stencil.  It’s really as easy as that.

Here’s another one I made with a heart stencil.

The pattern is from a paper towel!

You can tell I overdid it just a bit on this one.  There’s at least one spot where two neighboring holes ran together.  The paper towel was also more difficult to follow than the graph paper, so my lines aren’t quite as even.

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Perhaps the silliest thing I’ve bought off Etsy in a while: behold, my new stack of random pieces of paper from jamaica makes:

(picture from the etsy listing)

I ordered it knowing I’d like it, but looking through it in real life, it’s like she downloaded my brain.  There are at least half a dozen pages I recognize from notebooks and pads of paper that I have almost bought.  And there are half a dozen more that I have bought.  Maybe I should show off my graph paper collection some time.  It is mostly a woeful tale of my quixotic search for a replacement for my favorite discontinued lab data pad.

Anyway, jamaica makes has a blog and makes notebooks from the many papers.  They are very pretty.  I’m not entirely sure yet what I’ll make from my collection.  There are the address files by lovely design.  Most of my papers are too flimsy, and I don’t really need an address file.  Here’s a nice tutorial for little mixed paper notebooks (and a good idea to use a card as a cover).  Whenever I’ve tried to make little books before, I’ve never been happy with how even the edges look, though.  I suppose I could probably die cut them or something.  Hmm.  Need ideas.

Side note: jamaica makes also contributes to the group blog Effer Dares, which has like a scrapbook challenge theme.  It may be the first scrapper blog that has ever appealed to me.

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I was rummaging around in the craft room for things to use for encaustic, and uncovered a stash of doilies I bought from Martha by Mail a long time ago.  Conveniently, I also just recently came across One Pearl Button‘s tutorial for making a cute doily stencil.  (Also check out her version of it with metallic paint pens on votive-holders.)  I tried it on a graph-ruled index card.  Just holding it down was difficult for me, so I used spray glue to temporarily adhere it.

I overdid it slightly with the spray glue, so there are a couple of sticky patches, but I really like the effect.  I was surprised that even all the little dots and dotted lines came through, since they didn’t appear to have any actual space punched out, just a perforation.

Ha, I just noticed that apparently I didn’t fill in the upper left side dotty bits.  Whoops.

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2011 collection of calendars.  Another good year.

Laptop desktop: DigginFood series by Anne Bryant

Lab computer desktop: a reworked version of my grant planner from last year

Lab: The Paper Thieves screenprint on chipboard, ordered taking advantage of the abundant post holiday sales on Etsy

Craft room: letterpress calendar from ilee, found at a local craft fair.

Also this year I’m still using my perpetual calendar from Krank press for gardening and the Amy Marcella calendar from last year as a birthday calendar.  The days of the week are on the Amy Marcella one, but easily ignored.  I see from last year one of my resolutions was to do better at sending birthday cards and presents on time.  I have the same resolution this year :/  At least I just went through and finally wrote all the birthdays on it; that’s a start, right?

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Saw the vintage postcard calendar journal at Design Sponge and knew I had to make one for my sister.  Added inspiration from Emily Schwarting’s version.  Didn’t hurt that it gave me an excuse to buy a date stamp.

There’s no way was I cutting 183 index cards in half, so I went into the office store planning on getting just normal cards.  I found these cool upright orientation ones, though, so that solved that.

The economy date stamp at Officemax has 6 years on it (including 2010).  The original design doesn’t list the year and instead you write it in each day, but I wanted to include it as kind of a daily prompt, or at least a clue as to what you’re supposed to do with the stack of cards.

The last thing to find was the case to hold them.  The container store had some acrylic boxes that were just the right size.  Or rather, the right size for the packs of cards.  I didn’t leave enough allowance for expansion of the loose cards, and they are a tight fit.  The last month was a nailbiter.

The original design uses postcards for the month dividers, but I wanted something with the actual months printed.  These neat little clip flags fit the bill and come in index-card-ink colors.  I also made a placeholder one (peeking out the back).

I am very pleased with how it turned out, and I’m considering making myself one.  It took a loooong time, though.  If I’d done the math in planning this project, I would have realized that the total comes to 2210 stamps.  That’s if I never messed up, which of course I did several times.  I ended up with only 5 cards to spare out of 400, and I finished it literally 10 minutes before we left for the airport.  If I make another one, I’ll just do the date at the top.

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Impulse buy of the day: a handful of tiny calendars (like these medium ones but without the sticky back).  I have grand visions of letterpress holiday cards/calendars.

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I’m trying to improve my eating habits.  For one thing, I’m making a conscious effort to eat mostly vegetarian.  The second thing is to cook dinner more often.  I joke that I usually “assemble” dinner because I have a bad tendency to rely on fast processed foods, plus we eat out entirely too much.  So, cooking more dinners is the goal.  I’m also packing my lunch more frequently.

I think the main problem I have, besides simple laziness, is lack of planning.  I get home, poke around in the fridge, and try to cobble something together.  So, the two part solution is 1. write down and post in the kitchen what we’re going to eat each night using the fabulous printable meal planners from futuregirl and ollibird (any other cute ones out there I should put in rotation? ETA: found another one from A Print a Day) and 2. keep a flip book of dinner ideas.  It reminds me of meal ideas and where each recipe lives, and lists the major ingredients for reference when making the shopping list or at the store.

The covers are nice double-sided card stock + a pretty label that Becket got me a while back.  The pages are my old business cards.  The extended plan is to perhaps pull a Crafterall and cover up the wording, but we shall see if I ever get that far.  One design inspiration is the mini meal planners (example) briones & co used to sell, but the ring idea did not seem as compatible with my very jumbled bag as a simple clip does.  I’m going to make another packet with fishy ideas and another with meaty ideas for whenever I lapse.

ETA: more flip books

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I’m such a sucker for pretty graph paper.  Walking home from lab today, I stopped in to the UW bookstore and couldn’t resist the new Knock Knock line.  Oh boy.  So pretty.

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I am swimming in grant applications at lab.  One thing that would help would be a snapshot of the whole year so I can plan appropriately.  As a template, I used a cool calendar image I downloaded from some design blog and now I can’t for the life of me find the original.  I feel kind of bad that I ripped off their design, but it was perfect for the task and now I can edit the excel file with new deadlines.  It’s my new computer desktop image too.

ETA: download the xlsx file

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