All change!

Those of you that have seen my (growing) collection of personal size organisers in photos on the blog and on Flickr. I'm starting to find a use for them.

I've recently started going to French conversation classes again here in France. The classes are good, only 9 people in the class including myself so we get lots of practice and it's very light hearted and a great way of learning. When I lived in UK, I attended evening classes and dedicated my old Winchester Filofax for my French learning notes.

I also have a fairly new Finsbury that I bought on Ebay at a bargain price, but until now has remained unused, still in it's box. I am thinking of using this organiser as my journal next year, but it's also good for trying out different ideas as well.

Yesterday, I bought a Quo Vadis Timer 17 refill for the Finsbury. I quite like the format of these refills and they fit the Filofax organiser perfectly and of course I can buy them in my local newsagent here in France.

Here is a scan of the pages (click on the picture to see a full size version):

As you can see it's a week on two pages with a notes column on the right. They also do a slightly different format with boxes for phone calls to be made, things to do, emails to write etc, I have this format in my A5. But the notes format suits the personal size better I think.

I noticed another bonus with this particular QV Timer 17 refill, it's in French and English!....were as the Timer 14 (Pocket) size in only in French. 

As the QV refill is a 16 month format, I've transferred the last four months of the Finsbury diary fill to my Winchester, so I have a calendar I can refer to in my French classes.... result.

The French QV refills are available on the UK website which took a bit of digging to find as well as the European website.

Just to recap on the sizing of the QV range.

• Timer 14 - fits Filofax Pocket size, hole spacing correct
• Timer 17 - fits Filofax Personal size, hole spacing correct
• Timer 21 - fits Filofax A5, but pages need to be re-punched to fit. 

I did a post for Laurie on Plannerisms about my previous QV purchases, which you might find of interest, it's similar to the post I did here on Philofaxy

The main Quo Vadis line I think is in bound planners rather than loose leaf, this is born out by my local stockist devotes more shelf space to the their bound range and the loose leaf refills need to be searched for!

There are some real interesting finds if you look around the shelves. At this time of year it is all about new calendars for next year. Their range of other inserts covers address pages, notes pages, and quite a range of other indexes. The paper is excellent quality and it is lovely to write on with a fountain or gel pen, the paper is so smooth.

I have seen some pages in their bound planners and notebooks that I might turn in to Filofax suitable templates or my variation on them that is....

As you can see on their website the binders include leather and faux leather and plastic binders. The two shops I've visited in this area haven't had any of the leather binders in stock so I can't comment on their quality compared to Filofax, but I wasn't that impressed with the ones I saw in faux leather and cheap plastic.. which I suspect are aimed at school children and students.