My Hand Bendy Useful Thingy

I'm not sure what the correct name for this is, but it is terribly useful! It's a sort of holdall thingy with lots of pocketses and smashing bits to put stuff into.

As you can see, the front pouchy bit is quite excellent for the instant retrieval of pens. 

Inside is a plethora of handy bits and zip pockets to stuff stickers, rulers, paper clips and piles of other essential decorating items. 

I managed to get this for about £3.95 from ebay, so it wasn't even particularly expensive, but it is one of the best little storage/organising items ever.

It also manages to hold a lot more than you'd think!

The Pocket Malden - Continued

Since the sorry tale of the first attempt to obtain the Malden Pocket which failed miserable, I do now actually have one of the little blighters, and very lovely it is too.

The photo doesn't do it justice, and shows it as being a bit of a dark sludge colour when in fact, it is a bright and quite luscious purply purple.

My main reason for buying it was to just have it because it's so lovely, however I had to come up with a fairly believable excuse. After a few seconds of careful thought, I convinced myself that I NEEDED this to keep beside me so I wouldn't have to to the effort of walking the few steps to the kitchen (or more likely) rummage through the piles of stuff that had buried the A5 Metropol (see previous post.) Also it would be tremendously useful and convenient to sling in my bag on the odd occasions that I ventured outside. The idea also was for it to be used like a purse too, considering it's handy large pocket which runs behind the cover.

Here are a few random photos of the internal delights. 

Unfortunately I've stuffed it so much that it doesn't close any more, so I'm thinking of using it only as a sort of wallety type thing. Which obviously means that I absolutely must get a replacement for my bag. I may go back up to the personal size again. I'm toying with the personal Malden. I would probably need a new bag though as well to compensate for the extra size...

The softness and size of the pocket Malden is really quite joyous and I love the fact that it can double as a purse too! 

The Happy Place of the Metropol

This is my A5 Metropol which is kept in the kitchen and is the main filo for pretty much just about everything relevant to scraping my way through the days and weeks. If it doesn't get noted or put in here, I will totally forget about it. Guaranteed.

Until recently it was assigned to the kitchen table, but kept having to be moved every time we sat down to munch. The poor thing would get shoved on the other table where inevitably stuff would get dumped on it and before you knew it, it was buried under a pile. Because of this lack of visibility I'd forget to look at it and check what was happening over the next few days as well as not putting new notes in, which therefore would also be promptly forgotten about thus completely contradicting the whole point of having an organiser in the first place.
In a fit of uncharacteristic tidying last week, I made a nice new shiny place for it on one of the worktops where no longer would it suffer the indignity of being cast aside to the oubliette that is the dining/craft table.

So far, this has been an incredible success, other than when I completely failed to take a note of the hairdressing appointments that had been arranged for yesterday. But in all fairness, they had been made before the wonder of the new permanent place. 

Out With The Old

The Malden Pocket is no more and I've been reimbursed with the cost, which makes me feel a lot better now I know what's going on. Of course, my only course of action was to zip along to the Filofax web site and order one!

I wonder when it will arrive...

And now... To Business!

Since I don't intend to turn this blog into one long-winded eternal gripe about the non-appearance of my beloved non-existing Pocket Malden...

... On with the show!


May I introduce to you, my most splendid Ranger Personal....

Originally, this was going to be thrown into one of my many bags and taken everywhere with me. Because of this, I loved the fact that it has a purse on the front of it as it would save me lugging an additional purse around in an already full bag. (Obviously this would mean I had to buy a more suitably sized bag...) 

Most spiffing, don't you think? However, as it turned out I keep it on the kitchen table and as far as I can recall, it has never made it out of the front door with me yet.

This is the inside left bit. It has 6 card holders and a mesh pocket, jolly handy for holding sticky dots and other such delightful stationery items. There's is also a full sized pocket just behind all that. The pic on the right is a top loading plastic pouch - great for holding upcoming tickets for events which in this case, got cancelled! GRRRR!

Next page is one of those clear plastic pages with others tend to call 'dashboards', so for sake of argument, I too shall call it thus. Basically, tis a thing where you can stick sticky notes and is terribly useful.

A random page of daily busyness. I found some handy re-stickable arrow type things which I label with recurring events - things like when the buckets and recycling should be put out, because I get rather confused with such things and always got them muddled up - when I remembered about them at all.
After the week is over, I just pop them onto the next relevant dates.
I also use transparent day-glo highlight stickers to put over stuff I really shouldn't forget about. These can be pulled off after the event and re-used. I also use mini sticky notes for to-do lists I have to see to before a specific thing - in this case, it was what I needed to do before a Christmas concert that weekend.

A few more plastic dashboards to store any highlighter stickies that aren't in current use

Next comes a load of stickers for general decorating.

Because you can never have enough stickers! These are of the Stickopotamus variety which are easily available.

The back page is a plastic section for business cards or other such sized items.

The inside back cover has a mesh pocket - there is also another full pocket behind.

The very back contains yet another splendid pocket, which I keep forgetting to put anything in at the moment. 

So.... there you have it, a brief intro to my personal filo. It has evolved over the year to be mainly a diary / to-do thingy and is an ongoing project, but has so far been highly useful! 

Oh Where Can It Be?

Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?Oh where do be my lovely new pocket Malden?

For those of you who may have missed the subtext there,  my eagerly awaited new Filofax of delight has not yet arrived.

I may soon have to actually post about my other preciouses soon...

Christmas Eve

Will my lovely Malden come today? Will it? I await with nervous anticipation... 

In the meantime, I've been reduced to fiddling with the pocket Metropol...