2018-2019 Erin Condren Planner Unboxing Video + Coupon Codes
Hey everyone! So it’s been ages since my last post and product release. I’ve actually been creating a new product line to replace the current one. That isn’t ready yet, but in the meantime I decided I’d share something that I’ve been getting into lately. I know that planning isn’t necessarily crafty on its own, but it certainly can be if you make stuff for planners. I used to be into the idea of planners, but never followed through. Now, years later, I’m getting into it again, and I actually did buy one, the new Erin Condren 2018–2019 life planner. I filmed a video of me unboxing it and talking a little bit about it. It’s not the best quality, I’ll be the first to admit, especially since I don’t have an overhead camera (just my iPhone) and the actual unboxing part ended up being quite blurry. I did take a few nice photos to make up for it though. This is going to be one of those videos where I look back at it many years in the future and laugh at how naïve I was about filming. I’ll get better, I promise. I just wanted to get this out there since it’s a brand new planner and people might want to know what it’s like before buying it, and how it’s different from last year’s.
So for the crafty part: I know a lot of people buy cute accessories for their planners (not including stickers) and I decided to make myself some of the basics since I have pretty much every craft supply out there. It wasn’t too difficult to make a matching elastic band and then sew a ring for charms onto it. And then attach a clasp to a charm to put on it. I know that most people put charms on their traveler’s notebooks, but I’m not interested in those and thought why not do it with EC planners. I’m not really sure why I don’t like the idea of traveler’s notebooks or bullet journals. With TNs I think it’s the binding and the covers I’m not a fan of. I like having everything already together and built with sturdy materials so it doesn’t look like it’s going to fall apart if you give it a good shake. With bujos it’s definitely the paper (and the boringness of it). I think dot paper is the most useless—well, second to graph paper, but that may have an actual use in math or science. In that case it is more useless, cause there aren’t even lines. You have to draw those yourself. But if you just want to write, you have to write over the dots, and then you’re pressured to stay within a certain number of them. And if you want to draw, well, be prepared to draw over dots. It just seems so ugly. People can totally get creative with them, and they do, and it’s great, but not my thing at all. I’m as creative as the next person, but I like how EC planners are pretty much already organized for you. I don’t have to create my own sections. I don’t feel like I have to draw to fill in space, and I can’t draw anyway so it’s fine. My creative journal preferences come in the form of stickers, which are so pretty and fit so neatly into the little boxes. That’s my kind of planning. That’s why I went for the EC planners and why I probably won’t touch another planner.
Craft part II: The stickers. Yes. I have always been sort of a fan of stickers, but never had any practical use for them. You can see my current sticker collection in the video and it’s sad. I stopped actively seeking them after a while cause I wasn’t doing anything with the ones I already had. In fact I think most of the ones in the video are gifts or ones I stole from my mom’s collection. If I did have any stickers I had picked out, they were used for a project and are all gone now. It’s super sad. I would be embarrassed to use any of those in a planner and only a few of them would even be worthy of scrapbooking. But now that I know their practical uses in planners, I can go hog wild if I want, and I plan to do so. (“Plan.” Get it? Hahahahaha.) But have you seen the prices of some sticker kits? They’re all like $20 for something you use only once, once a week for the weekly kits. If you add that up, you would be spending over a thousand dollars a year to decorate your planner. I personally like the idea of buying the e-files you can just print yourself, but the problem is that not everyone has a cutting machine or sticker paper, and since I have a Cricut Explore instead of a Silhouette, I always have trouble with calibration. I swear, looking at the tutorials, the Silhouette was made for printing stickers and the Cricut is the last thing you would want to use for it. Calibration issues aside, the Silhouette software is clearly superior. I tested it myself. But it costs a lot of money to get a Silhouette AND pay for the software upgrade that allows you to print/cut stickers the most efficiently. I mean, it would probably be worth it to actually run a proper sticker business, but that’s for when I have a business already going and when I have money to spare for that. That may be further down the road. Meantime, I’ll just have to work with my Cricut to see if I can get it to cut that 1/32” over to the right to eliminate that tiny sliver of white space on my full boxes. It’s the most frustrating thing. Not to mention I can’t get it to print the logo but not cut it, print and cut the design, and then only cut the outline of the whole sheet. That’s something the Silhouette I believe can do, if you pay for that upgrade. There are YouTube tutorials for this in Cricut, but they don’t work for me. (They seem to for everyone else, though.) Anyway, what I’m ultimately saying is that I’m considering making planner stickers, but I’m having technical troubles. I’d certainly like to, and it may be a possibility—I may just have to stick with (another pun) selling digital files for now. And print other people’s digital files and manually cut off that sliver of white space myself. That I can do. We’ll see how it goes. And yes, I calibrated my Cricut three times. It still isn’t perfect. And using Bleed a) looks ugly and b) applies to the whole image, not parts. That includes the logo.
Coupon codes!
So it seems that all EC planners come with like a million gift tags and coupon codes. I got two for 20% off total purchase expiring end of this year, and one for 10% off expiring end of next year. I’m giving two of those away (and keeping one 20% for myself) because I don’t see myself ordering much from EC for the foreseeable future. I mean, I already have my planner, and I don’t need to buy any elastic or other accessories. (I didn’t mention this earlier, but I was also considering adding a pen loop—I make those myself too—but I forgot. And then realized I probably wouldn’t use one.) Maybe I’ll use it on a case. Because have you seen the EC planners? Those things are enormous. I thought it would fit in the case I used for my previous planner, but no. It was way too big. So I would have to get one especially for it. That’s probably what that coupon will go to. Anyway, I already gave away the first coupon code, the 20% off, but the second one (10% off) is still up for grabs. I’m giving it away to the next person who comments on the video saying they want it. Very easy. No annoying entry processes. (Ah, the privileges of having a small audience…) So head on over there if you want it. Also, I’m just gonna set the video itself in here so you can see it if you want without heading over to YouTube. But you’ll have to do that in order to comment.
Now, that’s all the stuff I would have said if I knew how to inject non-robotic personality into a video, but alas I do not. Not yet. Also it would take like an hour, probably, and would involve tons of editing for the parts where I lose my train of thought or pronounce something wrong. (I don’t know how people do PWMs or hauls all in one take. Seriously, how do they not mess up anything for that amount of time? Teach me your ways.) And maybe one day I’ll learn to adjust the volume so that it’s about the same for all segments of the video. The voiceover is drastically louder than the parts where I’m filming myself talking, despite adjusting the volume in video editing software. Another thing I’ll have to figure out. But if you made it to the end of this post, congratulations. You are the real MVP. And keep an eye out for more planner-related posts.