As I have mentioned previously, I have been a contributor to The Well-Appointed Desk for the past several months with posts about my journey into fountain pens, notebooks and all things desk-related.  In this particular post my love of planners and knitting meet and so Ana and I have decided to cross-post this product preview. I hope you enjoy!

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Back in July, in a newsy post, Ana highlighted that a knitting pattern designer and an illustrator had teamed up to develop a planner for knitters, the Strickplaner (€ 18.90).  I had intended to order one, but then the designer was kind enough to send a copy of the planner to Ana, and she handed it to me to fawn over.

I’m calling this a “preview” because I haven’t actually used the Strickplaner yet as it’s for 2018, but I’m going to show you a few of the highlights today.

The Strickplaner is the brainchild of designer Martina Behm and includes illustrations (and stickers!) by Julie Levesque of Symposi Press.  The planner is designed with the knitter in mind and includes lots of planning and tracking pages in addition to weekly calendar pages.

The important details are:

• The Strickplaner is 12×18 cm (or 4.8 x 7.2 inches, slightly smaller than A6).
• It has a durable vinyl coated cover with pink embossed lettering.
• The Strickplaner has 240 pages, including 26 pages of knitting tools, and over 60 pages at the back of the book for notes (lined, graph and dot grid paper for planning).
• The paper is 90 g per m2 high quality writing paper.
• The extras: two ribbon bookmarks (burgundy and grey) and pink elastic.
• As a bonus for knitters, there is a pattern in the planner (and on Ravelry) to knit a cover for your book.

When you open the planner, the first thing you see are the delightful pink endpapers illustrated by Julie Levesque featuring sweaters, shawls, socks and yarn balls.

There is a short introduction on how to use the book and then you get to the meat of the planner.  At the start of each quarter are two full page spreads where you can set your goals and track your progress on projects through the quarter.  Immediately following the quarter spreads, are the 13-week spreads so you can make notes each week and each day.  This continues for the remainder of the year.

The second half of the book is all knitting tools.  Highlights include pages for knitting projects and spots for lists and notes.  I really enjoyed the execution of this section; there is an index at the front of each set of tools so you can track your lists, and then pages with varying box sizes, and lined, graph and dot grid papers.  I feel like this part of the book will be excellent for project planning, and even gives me space for designing knits – drawing diagrams and recording inspiration in a somewhat orderly fashion.

All in all, I think this is going to be a useful tool for both my planning and knitting needs.

Last, but certainly not least, I pulled a skein of yarn out of my stash and made myself a cover for my journal. I still hope to add a fancy button and button loop, but I can’t wait for 2018 to arrive so I can use my new planner.