New dividers...

…but not for the Aston, despite all the charming, pretty card I have.

Why???

Because I am approaching planner fail and because this post on Philofaxy inspired me to be more creative with making dividers for the Holborn, ready for when I well and truly hit planner-fail and move back to the personal size.

I may post soon on why, exactly, despite loving my little pocket Aston, I am reaching planner-fail with her, but today I wanted to do a quick post to show you my new dividers for the Holborn.

Many of you have seen/commented on the calligraphy in my filofaxes before and I too love the crisp lines and beautiful blend of simplicity and complexity – they look simple on one level, but the more you look, the more you see how complicated and intricate they are. A bit like people sometimes... Most times.

My set-up is fine – that isn’t why I am reaching failure with the pocket – and so I have recreated the same set-up but on cream card, which I think looks divine with the brown leather. In fact, the crispness of the designs with the dark brown leather are a small slice of ecstasy for me when I open the binder!

I decided to try and be a bit more clever with the dividers this time. I read this post on Tommes-S blog where he had put a mirror-image of the picture he was using on his dividers on the reverse side – quite rightly pointing out that when you open the filofax at the divider, you see the reverse side and not the front! I also wanted to print the labels on the tabs, rather than hand-write them in afterwards.

I am rubbish at being able to draft things out accurately enough to be able to print onto card first and cut later but thankfully my little printer will take filofax-sized paper/card without bother, so my first step was to cut two sheets of lightweight cream card into three pieces, each 10.5cm x 17.1 cm.

Next was to do the arty bit in a word document, sized to 10.5cm x 17.1cm. For each divider, I chose one of my calligraphy pictures (gathered from various corners of the web) and chose the picture settings to be centred both vertically and horizontally. I then re-sized each picture until it was a decent size.

For the labels, I made text-boxes, fixed their size as 3.4cm (I always use 5 dividers and 17cm/5 is 3.4cm), rotated the text and then positioned them on the far right-hand edge. Getting them in exactly the right spot was tricky (and I haven’t for some) as I was having to use a ruler against my laptop screen since I have not mastered the skills of text-box placement the ‘correct’ way, using the placement settings! Nonetheless, I can cope with them. The text isn’t perfectly centred now that I have cut the tabs, but they will work!

Then came the sneaky bit of having the same design on the reverse side. I flipped the text again and then moved the text-box over to the far left-hand edge and reprinted the card. If I moved the text-box by only using the left-arrow on the laptop, then they were at exactly the same height as on the original side. I needed to nudge a couple of the images to the side as now bits of the design were over-lapping with the label (the elephant trunk etc.) but otherwise, the images are in the same places and just the labels have swapped sides and orientation.

So, here they are… (before I trimmed them up).

Fronts…

Fronts of the dividers

And reverse…

Reverse side

I then measured where the tabs should be and trimmed them up by hand. I also shaved another 1.5 mm off the width of the tab, just because the text had ended up a little far away from the edge and it looked better.

Finally, I put some squares of clear, sticky-backed plastic over the tabs to protect and strengthen them and popped them in the Holborn:

Ta da!!!

What do people think?