A reader from Texas has a great idea for his daughter’s upcoming wedding, and he’s looking for advice:

I want to give journals to both my daughter and her fiance to record their thoughts and feelings while their hearts and brains are still mushy and creative. To be read at their anniversaries and low points. Do you have any suggestions?

What kind of a journal would you recommend? Something with a bit of structure, like a daily diary, or a more free-form notebook like the Habana or the Webbie? Any other ideas?

We often hear from people who are trying to decide between several different planning formats, or who’ve used a particular format for years but have always been curious about another one. As a Business user recently explained: “I still love the others and am pondering excuses to use them all, somehow.”

I totally know the feeling — I’ve been a Sapa X user for years, but have always wondered if I should try a format like Space 17 or Rhodia, with weekly note-taking space. Still, my jury-rigged time management system doesn’t make me feel like I *need* weekly note-taking space, so never I’ve indulged the curiosity. Though I did just find an excuse to use a Monthly 4!

What do you do when you see a new format that you like? How do you decide whether or not you’re going to switch?

Our weekly planners are more popular than our daily formats, but daily has its core users. One recent convert wrote in with an interesting rationale:

As I was starting to fill things into my planner I was like: wow, this is so much less stressful looking than my old planner was.

Daily planners are more “stress-less” because you can use them with a “one day at a time” mentality.

As always, it depends on your particular habits and schedule, but I thought it was a very good point!

It’s difficult to imagine that we had 20+ inches of snow last weekend, cause this weekend was beautiful: sunny, clear, with temperatures that had you peeling off gloves and scarves and even coats as you walked around.

I’ve been dreaming of spring ever since last summer, which seems to be something of an occupational hazard of gardening. This year, I’m prepared for it, too. I’ve already decided what I want to grow and ordered my seeds. I’ve also figured out exactly when I should start them, thanks to this nifty new Monthly 4 planner Karen gave me. In the past, I usually waited until the weather was warm, then scrambled to get my seeds started. Thanks to the Monthly 4, I’m already ahead of the game, and my tomatoes and brussels sprouts are sitting in peat planters on the windowsill.

I’ve never used a monthly planner, but I can tell it’s gonna be great. First of all, the calendar pages give me a great way to keep track of what I need to do, and get an overview of plantings, germination times, etc.

The notes pages at the back let me go into in more detail, and record stuff like what varieties I planted, how many plants I’m aiming to grow, and so on. I’m sure I’ll figure out more ways to put it to use as the season goes along.

Do you garden? Karen has two extra Monthly 4s in the office, waiting to be raffled off to the first two people who contact us to claim them. One has a spring green club cover, and the other has a Jade soya cover, so let us know which one you’d prefer and we’ll do our best to coordinate.

Good luck!

Chet Chin recently tipped us off to a cool idea for setting and sticking to goals: a small, downloadable booklet that you fill out, fold up, and carry in your wallet to remind yourself of, say, your financial goals and educational goals and so on. There are six categories in all — including one blank one — and enough space to list five goals in each category.

Chet decided to paste the categories into the notes pages of her customized planner rather than carry the card in her wallet. That made plenty of sense to me, because really, who needs another piece of paper in their wallet, gathering lint and dust? It also turns her planner into a nifty goal-tracking tool, because she can flip to those pages whenever she needs some inspiration:

Besides writing down the goals, I plan to write down the progress of meeting those goals. Which would make the “Notes” section a log of sorts.

Neat idea, eh?

Image via.

We just got a couple new images from Christian Skagen’s “Horizontal Fields” series, which we blogged about last week (with my apologies for having flubbed the title; sorry — it’s “Horizontal Fields,” not “Horizontal Lines” as I first wrote).

Anyway, click through to see some pieces Christian made with J. Herbin Rose Tendresse and Bleu Azur and a Pelikan M250 EF:

Here’s Rose Tendresse in a decidedly darker mood, with Pelikan Fount India:

Bookmarks can be sold separately by retailers if they choose to buy them. They are sold in a pack of 10.

I have a few extra in the office I would be happy to send to our QV blog readers.  Please send us a quick note with your mailing address via the Contact Us form on the blog.

You can have a look at photos of them here.

Karen sent me a few sheets of Clairefontaine DCP paper in the fall. DCP (which stands for “Digital Color Printing”) is a thick, white, glossy, A4 printer paper, and it’s apparently designed for printing photographs and other color graphics. It comes in ivory, too, and can also be used, Karen told me, for bookmaking.

I don’t have a color printer, and I haven’t tried to make a book since the 3rd or 4th grade. Frankly, I found the A4 size a little awkward at first, since it’s thinner and longer than standard American paper and didn’t really fit into any of my binders. So I stuck it in a folder and forgot about it until this weekend, when I needed to customize an old tea box for a present and didn’t have time to go out and get the proper supplies.

DCP, it turned out, was just the thing for the job. I wanted something I could write on (so decoupage was out), but I also needed paper that was thick enough to hide the images on the box I was reusing:

(Very tasty tea, by the way.)

Anyway, take a look at how thin and inadequate my ordinary “premium” printer paper was:

By contrast, the DCP gave me nearly perfect coverage:

So I glued it in place with rubber cement, trimmed the edges, and refashioned the box. I’m no artist, so I kept the decorations simple, and even stuck to the office-supply theme with a bit of highlighting:

123 T, if you’re curious, is a unique and tasty blend made from mint leaves from my garden at 123 Pioneer Street.

Proud as I am of my garden in the summer, the yard really never looks better than it does in the snow, with icicles hanging down from the old, rickety shed and white mounds covering the fence… And check out the wall that greeted me when I opened the door this morning!

Now that my Internet connection has finally been restored, here’s wishing everyone on the East Coast a happy last-blast-of-winter…

We talk a lot about writing on this blog, and inspiration and creativity. But I’m wondering: what are you reading?

I just finished Janet Malcolm’s awesome work on the relationship between authors and their subjects, The Journalist and the Murderer, whose smart analysis of the story behind Fatal Vision is relevant to both fiction and non-fiction writers. Before that, Rebecca Goldstein’s Mind-Body Problem. I’m not sure what I’ll read next.

What about you?

Image by Wonderlane.