Forget about this year. I am all about using this year to plan for next year, in too many different ways it seems.

I am already rethinking my temperature square blanket. (An update on this is coming.)

I am completely rethinking and redoing next year’s planning system—again.

We are planning to swap bedrooms for Duncan. So the office will be going away. It will be repainted and become Duncan’s new room. His current bedroom will be cleaned out and repainted. We’ll use that as a spare bedroom. We do have reasons for this that we prefer to keep private at the moment.

But this swap and change have shifted a lot of my plans for the house, but not in a bad way. It is something I am grateful for on several fronts.

Anyway…

In last week’s newsletter (find it here), I mentioned how an A6 Stalogy was not my jam. I am using an A6 Archer and Olive dot grid notebook for my evening reflections. This is a practice currently in flux, by the way. Once I have a firmer grip on the whys and wherefores of this practice, I will tell you about it.

The grid spacing on the Stalogy A6 is too big to be comfortable for me to write in. The proportions are off for me somehow. The book itself overall is so tiny, but the grid-spacing, the line-spacing, is too large for me to be comfortable. A smaller book, for me, means smaller writing.

I was on board prior to pulling out my A6 anything and playing with them to buy a Hobonichi Techo in the A6 size. Not as a planner per se, but for the nightly reflections journal. (I ‘blame’ Rachelle In Theory for this; her YouTube channel is where I learned of this.) Then I pulled out my A6 Stalogy…and although I love Stalogy, the A6 one is not for me as a writing journal.

I do use it as a daily bits and pieces collage journal. I learned this from the ALP (find them here, the Awesome Ladies Project). The basic premise is to basically use whatever you find on your desk to scrapbook or glue down or collage. Use whatever terms you want to use. I had started doing this in 2022 (I think), but life intervened and I moved part of that practice into my memory-keeping journal and let the A6 go.

I had pulled out the A6 collage journal meaning to start using it as a reflection journal, but it didn’t quite feel right to me to use it for writing. So, I started my collage practice back up. Currently, I am decimating an old Knit Picks catalog to use as collage fodder and I am loving it to pieces.

In Archer and Olive’s last subscription box, they sent a cute little A6 dot-grid notebook. When I received it, I sort of looked at it, thought it was cute, and put it on my shelf. I am not that much of an A6 person. (Don’t look at my shelves. And please don’t point out that the past four books I made and bound myself were all A6. I know. I know. Lol)

I very much wanted to try out an evening reflection journal.

After hemming and hawing for a few days, looking at B6 notebooks, slim dot-grid notebooks, A5 notebooks, my current journaling notebook, and even spiral-bound notebook paper notebooks, I decided I would give the A&O journal a whirl and see how it felt. If worst came to worst, I could set it aside until I decided to turn the journal into something else. Even if that became a collage journal at some point.

I also chose it because it has a pen loop. I love pen loops because my pens — someone or something absconds with my pens and even though there are literally THOUSANDS of pens in this house, somewhere, the ones I want to write with and love, and at times just any old pen that will actually write, is impossible to find…unless I have a pen loop to keep the pen in.

To be honest, the pen loop on the little A6 A&O notebook (Nope, for some reason I have not yet given this one a name.) is more than a little tight for my pen to fit in. I am using a Uni-ball Signo RT1 that is .28mm. I am loving this pen.

I use this as my planner pen for a lot of my planners. It is not the pen I use when I am sitting and writing my novel or anything else by hand. But, in my planners, where neat and small writing is necessary, this pen is amazing.

So, I have learned that Stalogy notebooks are good for me in many many ways and I dearly love them. Writing in the A6 version is not for me. And that’s ok. Writing in other A6 notebooks is not only doable but terrific for me. So I will keep doing that.

Until next time.