KAISERCRAFT JOURNAL PLANNERS: PART I

A week ago, I was contacted by the lovely Kylie from Kaisercraft asking me if I wanted to do a review for one of their newest products: the Kaisercraft Journal Planners. Yes, you read that right, the well known Aussie brand is bringing on the big guns and releasing their very own journal planners. Being a loyal user of their products, I was absolutely ecstatic when I got the email from them. Of course I would love to review it! For one, I love planners, and for another, I love Kaisercraft! What combination could be better? So along with some other goodies, Kylie kindly sent me a big box of yummy new Kaisercraft goodies. When the parcel arrived the next day (yes, next day!), I was not disappointed.

Here's what I received:

To say that I was excited would be an understatement. These were the items I received (most items are not in store as yet, so I've included their arrival dates for future reference!):

1) Journal Planner: available in store November
2) My Year, My Story: these includes the collectables, paper pack and paper pad, and are available in store December
3) Glitter tape: 8 colours in total and are available in store December
4) Printed tape: available now

Glitter and printed tape, Kaisercraft Journal Planner, 6x8" Paper Pad

Here's a better look at the My Year, My Story collection (and of course, the new journal planner):

But now to the most important part of this review, the Journal Planner. We'll start with the basics first: the journal planner comes in 3 different colours: black, blush (pink) and breeze (green). It's a PU leather journal with a magnetic clasp that holds everything together. I was fortunate enough to receive the breeze coloured journal planner (similar to the one on the front cover of the box) as I love green! I did have some troubles photographing the exact colour of the green though as a tad bit of editing makes the colour wash out entirely. Rest assured, it's a nice soft pastel green.

Here's how the inside of the planner looks like:

Inside the Kaisercraft Journal Planner

The inside contains pockets for little bits and bobs. In every pack, there are 5 gloss varnish dividers, 30 plain journal papers, 60 calendar/list papers and 9 clear plastic pocket pages. The papers are made of quality 180gsm or 300gsm cardstock so they'll be great for use with watercolours.

There are 5 different quotes on each divider. Here's a close up of the first divider:

The size of each paper is 21.5 x 17.7cm. They're made to fit the already available Kaisercraft (and other branded) plastic pocket pages, which are 6 x 10" in size. The only problem I found when using this format was the lack of hole punches readily available. I needed to punch each hole separately, using a piece of paper from their pack as a guide. Who knows, maybe Kaisercraft would be able to produce one in the future? *wink wink

When you first start out, here's what you'll see:

Inside Pages

Plain grid pages with the days of the week on one page, and a list page on the back. Looking at the journal planner when I first got it, the amount of ideas buzzing through my head was overwhelming. I could use it as a planner, a pocket page scrapbook; I could make my own pockets, my own dividers from patterned paper, I could use watercolour, I could create my own pages, I could add embellishments such as tags and ribbons and keychains to the rings, I could do just about anything and everything with this planner.

And because I was so excited to reveal this to the whole world, I'm going to show snippets of what I've done with mine. I will feature more layouts and more of my ideas as the weeks go by, but for now, here's a flip through of the many possibilities this new Kaisercraft Journal Planners has to offer!

I started off by creating my own pages from Heidi Swapp's Wanderlust paper pad. I love the vintage colours available and wanted it to be splattered all over my Kaisercraft journal planner. After I cut down my pages to size, I stuck the lime green monthly view from Kaisercraft's My Year My Story paper pack onto it and used their sticker sheet for my month of September. I had a fairly eventful September, filled with love and joy from everyone around me and wanted to document it in every way I can. The monthly grid comes undated so you're free to use it for whichever month you like.

Monthly View

Now, as much as I know that I could write up the dates in less than 5 minutes, I wanted some uniformity over it (here comes my OCD), so I decided to use my manual stamp to create my dates. It probably took me three times them amount of time to do it, but I was mighty happy thereafter. After some decoration to highlight this month's events, I had one completed monthly overview:

And since I know someone will ask, here's a list of the items I used in this monthly overview:

1- Kaisercraft stickers
2- Kellie Stamps
3- Kmart stickers
4- Paper Stone stickers
5- Roller stamps
6- Amy Tangerine stickers
7- Washi tape

As you can see, I even managed to fit some pictures into the grid. It was mostly coincidental that I had a set of small pictures lying around on my table waiting to be used that magically fitted. Hah!

On the back of the monthly overview, you'll come to see this:

When you turn the pocket page, you'll be seeing a Heidi Swapp tag I punched and put in as a page marker. And so I don't forget, I added a picture with a September tag poking out. These were all part of Heidi Swapp's Wanderlust collection which I took advantage of when Spotlight had them on clearance. Hee

When you flip the page marker away, you'll see a full spread of my week in review. As you can probably tell from the original pages, I decided to spruce mine up a little. I made my own sized paper, cut the weekly view up to just the area of interest and stuck it on.

Weekly View

The one thing that's great about this size is the ability to stick more pictures on the side of your weekly overview. Unlike my Midori where the gridded area is solely for journaling, the size of this planner journal is big enough to have a separate column for things like quotes, to-do lists, and in my instance, photos.

I have decorated pages after this, but have yet to fill them up. But to give you an idea of how they look like empty, here are some pictures:

Kaisercraft also provides stickers already sized to their pocket pages so yes, they can go into your journal planners too:

I hope you enjoyed this post and are just excited for its arrival in stores as I was receiving it a week ago! I will provide more inspiration posts using the new Kaisercraft My Year, My Story collection in the weeks to come, so stay tuned! And just a final recap, these journal planners will be available in November so they'll be nice and ready for the new year!