Tuesday, May 14, 2013

wat, u no likey? then changey!

I'm currently using Belle de Jour as my planner again this year. I actually have two copies, because someone gave one to my mom, then she gave it to me (she already had a Starbucks planner) before I could go to National Bookstore to get one, so I accepted. Then someone gave a copy to me, and my mom kept it to be even. But they were bound two different ways, and I kind of.. liked the second one better.

In the end, my mom didn't really manage to find a use for a second planner, and by the time I graduated I found an excuse to cross over from the spiral bound one to the smythe one. I told myself I'm doing it to signify leaving college, starting life with a clean slate, as my thesis planning and other things were documented in the spiral one. But honestly speaking, the smythe one simply just feels better in my hands and looks better to my eyes.

The cover, on the other hand, wasn't really my cup of tea:


I mean it's a good illustration. Objectively speaking, it's nice. But it just doesn't feel like it's mine when I look at the planner. So I felt an urge to change it to this:

I'll tell you about it, but first, a little bit of history between me and BDJ: 

I received my first BDJ Power Planner at sixteen (in 2007), from my mom's awesome + sweet boss/friend, (who's actually mentioned in the acknowledgments because her daughter was part of the group of ladies who created it hehe). Timing was perfect: it was so well-made and interactive that I got a hang of using a planner just in time for my first year at college. I never even properly used a planner beforehand (save for the really girly Avon free-date one I very sporadically used in gradeschool because it was cute and not because i needed it) and I can really say it was a lifesaver. I depended on it and it kept me sane throughout my really tough first year in college. (And I do mean tough. In fact, it was apparently much tougher than I remember. Apparently I called my mom crying during a panic attack after being left at my dorm. My mom mentioned it to me recently and I have no memory of it at all. Clearly was a weird + dark time, ew) ..UP was very different from everything I was used to. Apart from the culture shock, I was away from my closest friends and found it hard to make new ones. My planner felt like my best friend during these times.

So I hope I don't offend anyone by choosing to change the cover of the one I have now! I'm just way past my pink + black phase. It just doesn't feel like me when I look at the current cover design, and because of the roles my planners have had in my life since I started using them, that's a very important thing. If it is any consolation, I loved the pink + black on the 2007-08 ones to bits! 

I created a 4x4 cupcake tile image by googling "watercolour cupcake", choosing the prettiest ones, and tinkering a lot with MS Paint (i know, i know, i need to learn photoshop) which was the toughest part.. my background colour of choice doesn't simply fill in all of the spaces; not all whites are similar. so i had to manually brush around the cupcakes (leaving a very thin white outline) one by one, scale them to identical sizes, and arrange them in a grid.

I printed them onto sticker paper, doing a test print first:


and upon noticing that there's a fair amount of detail that has been compromised and that the background is a little too ridgy, i looked around for an option to print it in higher quality. i set it to "photo paper, best quality" and this is the result!:


infinitely better!!! i think it's noticeable even with these bad, partly blurry photos i took:

before
after....this photo is blurry, but if you look closely, the details of the watercolor still show better!
I was originally meaning to cover the whole thing with my awesome sticker print, but I really liked the texture of the cover underneath and the back was discrete enough, so I opted not to do the back. But I couldn't just leave it as is because it looked unfinished at the spine:


so i took a row of cupcakes and centered it along the spine, covering the spine completely:



et voila! my baby says it looks professional and i just about gushed and melted into the floor hihihi

i really shouldn't have written that thingy with my bad handwriting though.. then again that can be easily remedied.

I wish it was just as easy to just go change what I don't like with the rest of life, though. I'm finding it a bit hard lately. My sleep schedule is all messed up again and I haven't been exercising. But I have a couple of projects lined up which is nice, once I get myself to do them! And now that my planner is all pretty and cupcakey and feeling more like me, I'm going to find it easier to pick it up to plan my days and to generally enjoy my new-found freedom the best I can!


1 comment:

  1. I love this. I'm jealous. I go through planners like crazy because I've never found one that just.. ends up doing exactly what I need it to.. if that makes sense. Haha.

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