How to Set Up Your PLOTTER

hi everyone it's Daisy here welcome to today's video today I'm going to show you how to set up a plotter so for a lot

of people plotter is a relatively new uh notebook or Journal that they are investing in it is a really beautiful piece and I know that a lot of our

customers are getting their very first plotters and they may have never set up a plotter before so in this video I'm excited to show you how to set up your

plotter for the first time so these are some of the accessory refills that I would recommend for getting the most function out of your plotter and for

keeping it around in your life for as long as possible and keeping it in beautiful condition there are some accessories that plotter makes available that just kind of helps with the

maintenance and the upkeep of your plotter um help keeping it look the way it looks and work the way it works for as long as you have it hopefully this video does

help you if you're starting out with your first plotter and you're kind of thinking about getting some ideas for how to get the most out of your plotter

okay so I have a couple of plotters here in front of me these are not all the sizes we have and these are certainly not all of the sizes that plotters come in this is a mini and this is a Bible

size we also have an A5 size and then if you are shopping for plotters in general there are way more sizes than just this so just keep that in mind for the

purposes of this video I'm going to be showing you how to set up a Bible siiz plotter and this is a store sample so I

have this one with me with lots of uh scribbles in it from customers in store but I'm going to take out these pages

and and I'm going to start from blank so when you first get your plotter there's obviously nothing in it and this

is kind of how it looks obviously not exactly how it looks cuz ours is a little more patina since it's been in the store but this is basically what you

get it's a ring system binder and today I'm going to be setting this one up for just a basic notebook that you might carry around around with you so a portable notebook that you might carry

around with you for notes for list making for just any anything like that so traveling notebook and these are some of the refills that I'm going to be

using today because I think that these are some of the most functional and very useful refills accessories that will help you get the most out of your

plotter so the first thing I'm going to start with is the ring supporter so this

is kind of an interesting thing the ring supporter is this little kind of flappy

piece of leather that you slip over your rings of your plotter like this and the holes of it allow you to just kind of

fit it over your rings and it kind of hugs them very compactly so it might be kind of confusing what this does but what this

does is it actually protects the rings of your plotter from getting damaged if you're bringing it about and this is really going to be your everyday caring

notebook this might really get kind of beat up squished and compacted in your backpack or in your handbag whatever however you carry around your notebook

so this ring supporter acts as protection for the Rings and then another thing it does is it also protects the cover of your plotter so we

all know plotters are quite an investment and what happens over time what you might want to prevent it's an aesthetic thing is that the Rings will

start to show through the cover of your notebook so you'll start to see some sort of stains or some sort of Dent marks from just the hard metal rings

compressed against the leather cover of your notebook and this ring supporter sort of hugs the Rings which pads them a little and

prevents that from happening so that's all that does I wouldn't say it prevents it 100% either but it just sort of gives it an extra layer of protection I think

over time with use leather softens and this is kind of bound to happen no matter what with with a plotter or any

any ring system okay the next accessory that I think is super useful is the Fastener case this one works exactly the

same way actually as the ring supporter so to put it into your plotter you are just going to press down and let it kind of hug the Rings like that and just like

that it is pretty much in your plotter what this does is it gives you two pockets so there's a pocket in the front I love that they're clear Pockets

there's a pocket in the back you know so you can put pieces of paper you know whatever you can put useful stationary tools your little little cards or

whatever you whatever you carry around with you you can put into your plotter and carry it around with you because of

these Fastener cases okay next up I'm going to be talking about the lifters so there's a couple of choices there's pen

holder with lifter there's band with lifter and then there's just the lifter as well so these

are sort of like pencil boards they're kind of like stiffer pieces of plastic that you can put into your plotter and then obviously the pen holder has the

added functionality of being able to hold a pen into your notebook which is so useful in my opinion and then there's also the added functionality of having

this closure band which helps you to keep your plotter closed at all times and protect the papers inside from

getting damaged so I think both of these are super super useful I'm going to show you how it works with the band today and

just as a note whenever you are opening the rings of your plotter you want to use these two levers here

to push down and open them as opposed to prying the Rings open it just helps preserve the health of the Rings so I I have those put in now and to close you

can just close like that and the way this works now is your closure band is accessible from the top of the notebook which is a little different and then you

just kind of loop it around your plotter to keep your plotter closed and like I said to protect those papers inside your notes from getting damaged in your bag

and it's really easy convenient to use if you're opening it or closing it it's pretty quick okay so next up we need to

obviously put paper into into your platter so here I have the unlined uh memo pad the plain Bible sized memo pad

from plotter and what I'm going to do for to today's video is I'm going to divide I'm going to create sort of three sections in the plotter just

hypothetically speaking if you wanted to keep three sections or however many sections I'm going to do three today maybe you want to divide up like one is

for work notes one is for personal notes and one is for I don't know like ink swatching or something like that um or like budgeting so in today's video I'm

actually going to be using these Ray made Da Vinci accessories so ring system binders are not just a plotter thing

they are a whole thing and we can do a video on ring system sizes if you guys would like but so Bible size is a standard size so you can get more

refills if you want to get more functionality out of your plotter but I think that the like the ones that I'm choosing today are really really useful

so the first one is the index tab one so I'm going to use like I said I'm doing three sections today so I'm going to take three of these little

dividers and just show you guys you know an example of how you might want to set up your plotter but obviously you can have two sections three sections you can have

one section however many you want so there

is that and then I'm going to put in the next section like this with the index and

then put some papers in and the way that these memo Pages come is they're glue bound so

they're meant to be ripped apart and you are meant to use however many sheets you want in a time in your plotter up to about 70 I believe you're not supposed

to overload these little baby rings so the max Pages it will take is actually the number of pages and one that comes in one of these packs and the whole idea

is that you can add and go as you please you know because you're not you're not dealing with a a bound notebook here you don't have to carry around that many

pages at one time you really can customize it to however however many you need and you don't have to weigh down

your notebook okay so there are the three index tabs and now you can kind of open your plotter and you can kind of

begin to say like oh I need to make a grocery list so this is going to be in this section or I need to I don't know

I'm researching something for work and I can take notes in this section here so that's what's nice about having index tabs and plotter doesn't really make

these so it's nice to be able to use the other brands that make Standard Bible size refills and accessories like this another accessory that I think is really

useful is going to be the bookmark so there's a few options and there's definitely more than just those at Da

Vinci but here's one so so what this is is well it's a book it's a bookmark but it

it allows you to sort of Mark your page and and where you are so if you wanted to just open up and start taking notes so it looks like you know this is the

next page that you would be writing in you can just pop this one into your rings and obviously the bookmark is something that you're going to be moving around a lot because once you write on

this page you're going to be moving it here and so so on and so forth so they make it so that you don't have to open the Rings every time you want to take it

out you can just pop it out it's not a closed Circle there's a little opening here so you just put it in by

pressing and that's pretty much it so when you're ready to write in your plotter and your notebook all you have to do is sort of flip to it says today

or where the bookmark tab is and you can start writing right there and they also come in like this four pack which is really useful because say if you want like a bookmark for each section that

you've sectioned off you can totally do that as well and this also works as a straight edge and a ruler which is really really handy so yeah there you go

that is an example of how you might set up a plotter for the first time I will add that setting up a plotter or like any notebook setting up anything for the

first time really depends on how you're going to use it but I think this is one example of how you might set it up and the accessories that you might use to set up a plotter for the first time to

get the most use out of it hopefully this video helped you understand a little bit more about how to keep your plotter Rings safe from damage let us

know if you have any questions in the comments I think one of the most common common questions that people wonder about plotter is what is the actual experience of writing in a plotter how

comfortable is it with the Rings I think that that depends a lot on if you're choosing a plotter for journaling like long form journaling in which case you probably want to go with the A5 size

which will allow you to write in the plotter more comfortably if you are going with the mini size or the Bible size that I've shown here today these

are really best for is like quick notes or planning you can definitely use it as a planner making to-do list and things like that and if you do want to use this

for longer form notes you can definitely do that but you might run into an issue where you find yourself having to remove each of the sheets for writing because as you write on the left hand side of

the page you're going to find that your hand starts bumping into the Rings and it might be a little uncomfortable to write all the way to the edge of the paper so that's just something that I found and I wanted to address that in

this video let us know in the comments if you have any other questions about plotters what you think about this setup and if you use the plotter do you have any other favorite accessory refills

that you use with your plotter that's about it thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one bye