Daycraft 2013 Animaland Diary – Baboon – Overview and GIVEAWAY!

Reminds me a bit of the Regular Show

It’s 2013, and MAYBE YOU DON’T HAVE A PLANNER? Or maybe, in the stupor of a New Year’s hangover, you stumbled into some cut-rate box giant and picked out some unspeakably atrocious calendar to drag through the next year. Or maybe you have an incurable addiction to calendars and day planners. Whatever your deal, perhaps I have a giveaway for you.

Unless you hate pink. In which case, WOW, you are looking at the wrong giveaway.

You remember Daycraft? And their super cool planners? Well, some time last year they sent me a box of 3 spankin’ new 2013 selections. Even I cannot use that many calendar-planners, so I figured I’d share some of the love.

I’m even going to let you have the stickers

A quick run-down on the specs of this diary/planner/notebook/bound configuration of paper:

• Pink / Baboon
• Laminated pearl paper cover
• width 106mm x height 150mm
• 216 pages of 60 gsm paper
• Week-to-view
• International holidays
• Nutrition labeling information
• Gift ideas
• Year planner
• 71-week planner (WHOOPS I did not pay attention to the fact that this planner started in August 2012…I’m a little late on this giveaway, sorry. The thing was just so thin I figured there couldn’t be that many extra weeks in it. Goes to January 5th of 2014)

The paper is the same thin sort as I reviewed in my 2012 Signature Diary, so I imagine it’ll take various inks as well as that did.

I hope you like cute illustrations

Each month in 2013 starts with a little illustration and a month overview with room for notes.

No page without cuteness; see the little sheep at the bottom?

And here’s the layout for each week. There’s also a set of 4 perforated sheets in the back, each sheet divided into 3 sections, so if you need to tear off a piece of paper to give to someone, it will be an adorable piece of paper.

Now, if you’re interested in this little planner to make your year better, read on.

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THE GIVEAWAY RULES!

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1. To enter, just leave one comment on this post any time between now and Sunday, January 20th 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time. Since I’m feeling crazy and like I don’t give enough of my money to the postal service, let’s have this contest open WORLD WIDE. The only people who can’t enter are people on space stations, the moon, and those otherwise residing extraterrestrially.
2. One winner will be picked at random from the comments section of this post. Make any kind of comment—but only one comment! Comments in excess of one shall be deleted. The comments will be numbered in the order they are received, i.e. the first comment is #1, the second #2, and so on. Because my blog doesn’t seem to number the comments on its own yet, and I STILL don’t will probably never have time/the willpower to fix it, I will again hand-number all the entries in Photoshop like I did here. The Random Integer Generator at random.org will be used to pick the number of the winner.
3. I’ll post the contest winner on Monday, January 21st. Winner will have one week to email me. There’s a link to my email at the top of the right sidebar.

And if you can’t wait to see if you won, here’s the link to the diary—just remember that price is in Hong Kong dollars. Good luck, and thanks to Daycraft for providing this sample!

Daycraft Cookie Bookie

This is the most unreasonably adorable notebook I have ever seen, and that includes all manner of miniature assortments of bound paper. I couldn’t even mentally process how precious it was when I first received this sample from Daycraft. How can words ever hope to convey this:

Midnight snack edition

I’m afraid I can’t attest to how sturdy it may or may not be, because whenever I see my Cookie Bookie I just want to wrap it up in a paper-lace napkin and cradle it and remind myself that it’s not for eating.

I swear I’m not going to eat it! I just wanted some tea! Who would even use chopsticks to eat a gigantic cheese cracker, don’t be ridiculous.

The cover is that same irresistibly, touchably soft Italian polyurethane used in the Daycraft Signature Diary, with the added bonus that the Cookie Bookie cover is ever-so-slightly-squishy. Beautifully made, down to the little thread cheese dots in the cracker.

Lance wishes their crackers looked this pretty

Even the spine keeps up the appearance, properly recessed and cheesy-looking. I’ll have to get back to you on how well this holds up, but top marks for style.

Dishware not included

No elastic band or any other type of closure mechanism (that would ruin the illusion), but the book easily stays closed on its own (and strongly takes into consideration your request for it to remain open).

Love the slightly darker cheese border around each page

The paper did well with most pens I tested, including many fountain pen inks (particularly the quicker-drying inks like Lamy and Sheaffer). Thicker, wetter, slower-to-dry inks and the Sharpie Marker had a bit of shadowing on the other side of the page, and a couple dots of bleedthrough on the heavy inks.

The beginnings of bleedthrough with Noodler’s La Reine Mauve in a Caran d’Ache broad nib

The effect was very minimal, not something that would get in the way of my using both sides of the paper.

Is there any color I can’t use on this paper? …maybe highlighter orange?

I think I’ve found my new perfect paper for writing with the Uni Signo Broad white gel ink pen. Look at that ink pop!

NOW FOR SOME GOOD NEWS!

First of all, at the Daycraft website you can now order their products online with free worldwide shipping. Just PAY ATTENTION, all the listed prices are in Hong Kong dollars. So when you see HK$129, take a deep breath and pull up a currency converter, because at time of writing that’s just $16.63 in the US. Hopefully in the future the website will integrate a currency converter in the website, at least perhaps a drop down menu you can pick from if not automatically detecting the country you’re in, but one step at a time. The biggest thing is I can now review these notebooks and you can all actually buy them!

Good news #2: To celebrate Father’s day, Daycraft is offering shoppers who buy The Moneywrap online before June 18th a Father’s Day bonus – 20% off their next Daycraft purchase of other products. That’s $56.46 [at time of writing] for a sweet leather wallet. Feel free to buy me one, even though I’m not anyone’s father.

Thanks again to Daycraft for providing this sample for review!

The Cookie Bookie in Cream Cookie, Cheese Cracker, and Lemon Waffle at Daycraft

Daycraft 2012 Signature Diary

Say hello to my newest indispensable companion

Usually my spam folder is filled with oddly-capitalized tales of murder and intrigue, including sums of at least (US$7.5M) Seven Point Five Million U.S Dollars that need a Trust Worthy foreign individual such as myself to help escort out of any number of African countries for a percentage of said sum. But one rare day I spotted an email from Mr. Foreal Lee in reference to Daycraft Notebooks & Diaries. I carefully scooped this rare opportunity out of the spam folder, and am now three sample notebooks richer for having done so. The first notebook I want to review is the one I’ve put to the most use so far: the Daycraft 2012 Signature Diary.

It's true, they really do make your day

The cover is made of fine Italian polyurethane, which is an abbreviated way of saying “fantastically soft who-knows-what that I want to rub my face on even though people are giving me weird looks.” According to the papers I have here, this exact model seems to be the D631K 2012 A6 size Diary (Black Color) with 408 pages, 60gsm cream paper, 108mm x 149mm page-a-day model.

This is either a soft-cover notebook, or I possess superhuman strength. You decide.

Typically I am wary of soft cover notebooks, as I am dead certain that I will ruin them at the bottom of some bag, the covers will be all squished, and tragedy will ensue. But it has held up so far. We’ll see how it does over time as the year goes on.

There is a ribbon marker—not too short, not too long—but no elastic band and no back pocket typical of so many notebooks. Given how many empty pockets I have at the back of so many notebooks, I don’t much care about the pocket, but I do tend to like an elastic band. The notebooks I have without plastic bands have a tendency to sit around with one cover flopped up.

Like it's about to give a speech, or tell a joke or something

Content-wise, it’s jam packed. Well, not necessarily packed with jam, per se, more packed with information. I enjoy having daily planners with unobtrusive tomes of random knowledge, so this is perfect. My notebook has a list of international holidays for 2012, international guides for 28 different countries—tourist information, outgoing international code, what number to dial for emergency services, what type of currency is used & the denominations, what the value added tax is, what side of the road they drive on—etc., IDD codes, world time, size conversions, conversion tables, even nutrition and health:

Look at that. That is a little man climbing a food pyramid. And there's a list of the pros and cons of various nutrients. And the next page (not pictured) is a little lesson on how to understand food labels.

There’s also a table of food calories for common foods, how to calculate the calories you need, how to calculate BMI, gift ideas (traditional gifts for anniversaries, birthstones and flowers for each month, and the symbols and dates of each sign of the zodiac), special dates, year planner, and then, of course, the actual pages for each day.

Each month has a quote and an overview of the month before the daily pages start

I’ve used the month page to list out overall goals for each month, and highlight the days I’m scheduled to work.

Spoiler alert: one of the three days pictured here is my birthday

And then each day gets its own page, except for the weekend, which gets one page for both days. I’ve been using this diary especially for keeping up with my extensive list of goals and resolutions, so it’s nice to be able to plan out some goals for the next day on each page.

See those colors on the page? Each month has a different color. Don’t believe me?

That feeling you're feeling right now is the feeling of believing me

Now, very importantly, how does this paper hold up when it comes to the pen test? The thickness of each page is only slightly more than what’s typically reserved for facial tissues or voluminous holy books.

Maybe one day I'll order my writing tests according to color, so it looks more aesthetically pleasing and less like rainbow vomit

I was VERY surprised how well it handled a large number of pens, especially the broad nibbed fountain pens—there’s little to no fuzzing or feathering. Now, there’s bleedthrough like nobody’s business:

And yet now I'm making it everybody's business

But there are so many things I love about this notebook that I don’t mind sticking to gel pens and ballpoints. I’m currently way into using various Pilot FriXion models to plan things out, so I can erase if I need to without having to use a pencil. A notebook this colorful deserves exciting pens.

According to the Daycraft website, I can find no U.S. distributor for the Daycraft brand—but some of you international types may be in luck (here’s their list of distributors)—and there’s whole lists of shops for those fortunate enough to live in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Macau, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand or Turkey. But I see from both Pens Paper Inks…Whatever! and Notebook Loves Pen that Daycraft products may perhaps be obtained through a U.S. distributor by the name of Mr. Andrew Oentojo at Star Imports: starimport[dot]andrew[at]gmail[dot]com …so I’d say give him a try! Mr. Foreal Lee says we’re back to not having a U.S. distributor! :( My fellow Americans, guess it’s back to holding our horses and bribing friends overseas to get notebooks for us.

But honestly, this seems like the kind of AMAZING PRODUCT the equally amazing JetPens should already be carrying. (hint hint please?)

At any rate, I hope that the convenience of obtaining such diaries and notebooks increases exponentially in the near future, and that you are able to get one for yourself. Thanks again to Mr. Foreal Lee for this sample!

Ok let's just watch this one more time. This is the first animated .gif I've made and it makes me happy