Pam Alison Knits

October 1st 2025 saw the start of the final 4-month “term” in my planner. It will finish on January 31st 2026. I had every intention of it all being set up well ahead and I was surprised that I was still in turmoil come mid-October. At that point I started to draft this blog post as a self-pitying whinge about all the aspects that weren’t quite right, but I turned problems into opportunities and finally have a setup I enjoy.

For now

Late September and early October saw quite a bit of faffing about until I realised that I was unhappy with my plan to use up a variety of left-overs at least through to next March. In a fit of make-do-and-mend, I had cut blank pages from various notebooks to size and punched them to use in the Filofax. I had left-over months from random diary inserts that I tried renumbering, and don’t even get me started about the mismatched dividers. It all lacked the uniformity which I soon realised I need. Then, in trying to make improvements, I took a couple of wrong turnings which caused some short-term annoyance. In the end, though, they worked to inform my opinions about what I actually do want so I was able to reframe them as lessons learned.

I still had October-November-December diary pages from this year’s Stamford Notebook Company refill, so I have only January 2026 left as non-matching pages. I can live with that, can’t I? To make the whole planner feel more cohesive I replaced all my existing notepaper with cream lined pages, again from Stamford. This has been lingering in my stash and it feels good to be using it.

The most recent improvement has been to make dividers from some lovely greeting cards purchased from an artist with an Etsy shop. I’m very pleased with how these have turned out. There are only three, but I do feel like that’s the perfect minimal number – one for the lists section (to-do and things I’m pondering for the future); one to mark my diary; the last at the beginning of the notes section. The notes I’m keeping to hand are at the front of the notes section, the unused paper at the back of it. I previously had a divider between them, but I didn’t feel it was necessary. I rounded everything off by making a frontispiece from the Cowboy Crow card you’ve probably seen hanging out on my inspiration board in past photos.

I’ve removed some things, both from my planner and from my life, in a spirit of “that was then but this is now”. The only thing I’ve added is a fold-out 2025 year planner as I’m tracking some health metrics and it’s useful to have a dedicated page for them. I placed an order at Filofax UK as we headed into the second full week of October and this was one of the items I chose so I could get to the free postage and packing level. It was on deep sale because we’ve only got 3 months left of 2025, but it was worth it to me. Once again, I’ll renumber the dates for January so I can use it to round off Quad 3.

For later

Part of the Filofax order was via their “personalisation station” where you get to choose some elements of your diary inserts. I decided to order both month-to-view and week-to-view diaries which will see me through the three quadrimesters of 2026/27. The monthly will be my health metrics record, and the weekly for my usual mix of appointments and tasks. Both are on the Cotton Cream paper which is thin enough to optimise the number of pages you can carry, but thick enough to cope with my fountain pen inks. At the time, they had 15% discount on all their personalised inserts so it was a good time to do these.

I think the standard diary pages in Cotton Cream would have been perfectly acceptable. The small improvements I added through the personalisation were, to my mind, worth the extra cost with the 15% discount, though I would have been a little less sure at full price. The main special features I oped for were lined daily spaces, and not cluttering up the notes space on every page with a mini-month calendar. This will make room to add a quote each week if I want to. I also chose to have my own special dates printed, though the printing is miniscule. This is good in that it doesn’t distract or encroach on the writing area, but poor because it doesn’t stand out on the page. It takes time to write these in manually if you buy the standard insert, but it’s not much quicker to type them onto the order form and check that they are right before you place your order. It’s a bit like online grocery shopping – by the time I’ve ambled around the website I could have gone to the shop!

The final “filler” item on my order was a pack of the Filofax stickers which I will set aside for springtime because that’s the vibe they give. I think I like the Filofax sticker sets more than ones I’ve ordered from Etsy shops. Not much of a surprise there since they are sized perfectly for the pages I use, and are punched to fit the personal planner rings. A non-essential, but nice extra if you like a bit of feminine frippery on your pages.

Now, at last, I feel settled in my Filofax for the coming three-and-a-bit months, which is a relief.