Calender and Daily Planner Decor

I use my monthly and daily planners every day.  Due to my living in a small town I don't have much availability of planner styles so I end up with generic, plain ones (i.e. dull).  I've seen planners online with large price tags but they weren't decorated in a way I liked.  Recently I started noticing a trend in planner and calendar making and decorating and started reading some blogs and looking at Pinterest for ideas.  I don't have time to design and make my own calendars for each month so I've come up with a way to make my planners more visually pleasing and more enjoyable to use thereby hygger something I use daily.

I use two planners, one for my full time job and a personal one that I also use for my pet sitting business.  I'm describing how I use these techniques for planners but you can use these for any calendar you have.  The first thing I did was to buy stickers.  You can also buy sticker making machines if you want to print imagines off the internet and make your own stickers. I'll probably stop at some craft stores the next time I'm in Fargo or Bismarck to look for a wider variety of stickers but for now what I have available is working.

This is a picture of my work planner page undecorated.  Obviously very generic and dull looking.  I can write what I want in it but looking at this doesn't inspire me or make me smile.  I apologize for the poor quality pictures but I had to use my phone camera to take them.

This is how I decorated next week's pages.  I need a lot of space to write information in regarding my work production so I couldn't use a ton of stickers, but it definitely improves the look of the page.  As you can see I went seasonal and used some Sunflower stickers.  The package did several pages in this planner and also a month in my personal planner.

My personal planner is a bit more fun for me.  This page is for November as I already decorated October's pages before deciding to post regarding how to do this. I found some cute dog and cat stickers that I use for days I have pet sitting clients.You can see I've already got a reservation in November and I've got the stickers on those days.

Here's October's pages.  I would typically have gone with a Halloween theme for this month but for some reason felt really drawn to the fall theme in both planners.  You can see how much more appealing and fun it is to look at.

I went pretty basic with just using stickers for decorating.  If you have more time and/or are more resources available you can cut out decorative paper in the sizes of the squares.  I've seen birthday print paper used on days with birthdays.  I've also seen major projects where they used a variety of papers and had put patterned or colored pages on every day of the month making the calendar look like a quilt which was pretty but I imagine very time consuming.  If you chose to do something like that, you'd definitely need a sticker making machine.  I've seen some use washi tape and I may try that in the near future.  To make the tape narrower you can slice it in half using a paper cutter with a sliding razor cutter.  Some use die cuts over the top of the papers.  A lot of techniques used for scrapbooking are being used for calendar and planner decorating.  The awesome thing is you can decorate to whatever level you're comfortable with and have a lot of fun personalizing something most of use on a daily basis.

HYGGE

The Danish call it hygge (prounced hue-gah).  There are many definitions of hygge but they basically come down to living a life well.  Louisa Thomsen Brits describes hygge this way in her book "the book of hygge - the Danish art of living well", "It is therein the rhythm of your daily life, in your habits, routines and rituals."  and "It can be found in asking yourself where you feel most at home, what are the activities and customs that anchor you, who makes you feel at ease, what is it that contributes most to your sense of welling, what do you do to unwind, what do you reach for to create comfort?" 

Basically, it's the rituals of our life that make us feel happy.  It's the small as well as the large things. It's the way we decorate our home as well as the lighting of a candle on the dinner that makes us feel warm and comfortable.  This concept has caught the attention of many as people around the world as many are trying to find more happiness in their lives to balance the increasing chaos of the world, the feeling of safety.

Each of will define hygge a bit differently and that's okay, that's the way it's supposed to be. You can hygge everything about your life from putting warm, cozy flannel sheets and a down comforter on your bed in winter with plenty of plump pillows to hygger your morning ritual of lighting a candle before you start your coffee or cup of tea and sitting and enjoying it instead of taking your cup with you to the bathroom and sipping on it while you put your makeup on or you rush off to start up your computer to look at emails and social media.

So where am I taking hygge and my blog?  I plan on sharing ways I'm adding or removing things in my life to help balance it and to increase my pleasure.  The current "glamping" trend is a form of hygge and I'll share as we continue our rebuild of my camper.  Organizing, especially with the help of books like "the life-changing magic of tidying up - the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing".  From what I've read the Danish apparently decorate somewhat spartan like and without a lot of clutter. I hope to remove things that aren't causing me pleasure so I can enjoy my space more. The trend towards slow cooking and cooking meals at home is also a form of hygge and I will continue to share more menu plans and recipes.  So there won't be a ton of changes, I just have a name for it now and will focus my posts in this direction.




If you'd like to read about hygge, there are a growing number of books about hygge on the market with several scheduled to be released later this year and early next year.  There are several books on the topic available for free with Kindle Unlimited.  I have two in my reading queue that I'm getting ready to read and will review when I finish them.

"the book of hygge" that I mentioned above is somewhat of a philosophical look at hygge.  I find this book reads best if read in short blocks of time.  Unfortunately this is in printed book form only and you can't get it on Kindle at this time. I picked up a nice hardback of it used.  The photography is awesome.  The pictures give one a feeling of warmth as you read.  This is a book you'll read over and over to get all the nuggets from it.


The book that introduced me to the concept of hygge was "The Year of Living Danishly" by Helen Russell.  It was an interesting book about a Brit who moves to Denmark when her husband takes a job with Lego and the book describes a year's time of her trying to adjust to living in a new country and it's customs, which includes hygge.  She doesn't go into much detail about hygge, but she does mention it several times which caught my interest.  I have this book on audio through Audible.

The Cozy Life: Rediscover the Joy of the Simple Things Through the Danish Concept of Hygge by Pia Edberg can be bought fairly cheaply on Kindle or in printed form and is a nice introduction on the subject of hygge.  It's a free read if you have Kindle Unlimited.  It describes things you can do to make life cozier.  It's a nice short read.

AUGUST RAMBLINGS - IN LOVING MEMORY

It's been a heartbreaking month for me.  I've lost two of my beloved dogs, Tip and Oreo, within two weeks of each other.  Tip's heart gave out and Oreo plunged into deep dementia/Alzheimer's after losing what little sight she had left.  Tip missed his 15th birthday by a month and Oreo would have been 18 in October so they lived a good life, I just wish I'd gotten more time with them; although, I don't think I'd have been ready to lose them ever.   I lost Tip on August 17th and Oreo on August 31st.

TRAVELS:

Matt and I actually ventured from home this month.  We spent a beautiful 4-day weekend in Minnesota on the lake with friends.  Tip got to go on the trip with us and enjoyed laying in the lake like he so much loved. The picture below is the pups hanging out by our tent.  We camped in the back of the cabin this year by the lake.  Absolutely beautiful.

The couple we stayed with renewed their vows at the cabin, which was lovely.  This was after the vows ceremony.

We also ventured to Bismarck.  I had some business I needed to do and then afterwards we went downtown to the historic part of town to have lunch and a bit of shopping.  Matt had wretched his back so we weren't able to do much shopping unfortunately.

We ate lunch at Peacock Alley. It was originally a hotel build in 1933.  The hotel was widely known and many famous people stayed there including Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jack Dempsey and Jose Louis. There's a tunnel underneath where they would bring the high profile people from the railroad to the hotel.  Unfortunately we didn't get to take the tour.  The tunnel was also alleged to have been used to smuggle in booze during prohibition and of course prostitutes.

They have a wide menu of items.  I tried the Beer Reuben.  The corn beef was marinated in beer and the sauerkraut was brined with beer.  It was definitely tasty.  The French Onion Soup also used beer instead of wine.  It was good although I think I prefer the more robust taste of wine in my French Onion.

Beer Reuben and French Onion Soup

 They are also known for their martinis and beer.  Since the martini special that week was a chocolate martini I HAD to try it and it was quite yummy.  Nothing like drinking your dessert before you eat. Matt tried one of the specialty beers and had a burger he said was really good.

Chocolate martini and beer

After that we went back to his vehicle and got his growler so he could get it filled at Laughing Sun Brewery.  They had homemade cream soda that I enjoyed.  Matt got his refill of Black Shox Porter and bought me a growler of cream soda to bring home.  They also had a tasty Sinister Pear Ale. It's a nice little brewery and have live music nightly that I'd like to go back for. It was a good thing we'd eaten as they do not serve any food except for pretzels.

Laughing Sun Brewery

CANNING:

I wasn't able to get much canning down this month like I'd hoped.  I did buy 3 dozen ears of corn and managed to can 18 pints.

CRAFTING:  

I've been working on coasters this month using the Amish Toothbrush technique.  I've been playing with some leftover scraps from rugs.  These are some of the latest ones I've completed.

READING:

Simply Irresistible by Ellen T. White
Interesting overview of famous/infamous women and what they had that attracted men so much. The author comes up with five types of sirens that draw men to them and gives brief synopses of several women who demonstrate each type or a combination of types.  It frustrated me a bit that there wasn't more information on the women, but it's a good place to start if you want to know more about the women who influenced some of the greatest men in history.

Bear Patrol Series by Scarlett Grove
I've been reading a bunch of this series so I won't list all the books.  I just finished Detective Bear. This is a shifter romance series were they turn into bears, typically brown or polar (Ski Bear).  Backstory on this series is that shifters came out that they existed and after years of harassment the Army drafted them to help win a war, after which they were all heros. This group of bears also settled in the same area as they'd been a tight special ops unit while in the military.  Geek Bear, Cory, is a wiz with computers and develops a dating app that can match them to their mates 100%.  The bears are also a tight rescue unit for the area and find lost hikers and such. These books are on the shorter side and I can finish one in a night.

Plain English: An Amish Memoir by Susie Fisher
This is a true story of a girl who grows up never feeling part of her Amish Community and leaves it with the result of being shunned.  Interesting family dynamics both before and especially after she left.

Shadow Spell by Nora Roberts
This is the second in the Dark Witch Trilogy focusing on the brother as they continue to try to figure out how to destroy Cabban.

Homespun Mom Comes Unraveled by Shannon Hayes
Shannon Hayes has a blog called The Radical Homemaker.  Interesting book about how she morphs into a radical mom.  She also has a Facebook page under Shannon Hayes as an author.  The Brocante Book Club is going to be reading another of her books soon.