stickers

Who Says Stickers are Just for Kids?

Tuesday Revews-Day

Not me! And neither does Mo over at PipSticks, a stitcker subscriptions service that I’d heard about, but didn’t decide to try until a planner friend told me about her experience with it. Now I’m passing on the favor.

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If you loved stickers as a kid, this subscription service is for you. If you were a Lisa Frank addict? You’ll find something to love on the monthly missives. And if you’re a planner girl who likes to decorate her pages, it might be worth a go for you, too.

On your first month you receive a best-of packet, which was a nice surprise, and the stickers in that month’s envelope were really stand-out. I haven’t used many of them, but I love looking at them. They make me happy 🙂 The following months were the usual assortment, though, so it’s best to plan to give it at least a couple months to make up your mind.

There’s a loose theme to each month’s stickers, but it’s not like a kit from a sticker shop that’s all meant to be used together. This was the planner friend’s only real quibble with it when we talked–some stickers were a little random and she couldn’t build a page around them. I don’t worry about that as much, so it wasn’t a deal-breaker for me.

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In addition to the stickers themselves, there’s usually a postcard (pre-stamped and everything) and a quote card plus a newsy little newsletter. Little additions like that make me happy and show a level of effort on the company’s behalf that I appreciate. There’s also a raffle ticket inside, and the newsletter prints the ticket winner (from the previous month’s batch) for the given prize. The prizes have been pretty sweet (an Instax camera, a Kikki-K binder, to name a couple of recent ones), so hold onto that ticket! (It’s also a pretty ingenious way to keep people subscribing from month to month; as a small business owner, myself, I give them mad props for that stroke of brilliance.)

And if once a month is not enough, they have grab bags available on their website, too. I’ve ordered their shape grab bag as well as one other decorative set: they shipped fast, arrived intact, and were very cool happy mail.

If all you get in your mailbox is bills and junk, this sticker subscription will be a nice change of pace. It doesn’t take up a ton of space or give you a lot of samples you can’t use. Just cool stickers. And if you find a sheet or two you don’t like? Brighten someone else’s day by mailing them to a penpal or friend who also might like some sticker fun. It’s really hard to go wrong.

PipSticks offers several different subscription levels for kids and adults. Once again, this was not a sponsored review, I’m just a happy customer!

DIY Plannner Stickers with Labels and Stamps

In The Studio

January is, of course, the perfect month to talk about planning, planners, organization, and all that fun stuff (well, fun for me, your mileage may vary). Imagine recognizes that and ordered up some posts and projects on that subject. I, for one, was happy to oblige.

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I spent a couple of fun hours with stamps and inks and sprays and–this is key–a whole host of Avery label sheets to make my own stamped planner stickers. It meant I could go from needing all of this to stamp in my planner:

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To just needing this little handful:

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Not bad condensing, wouldn’t you say?

You can check out more about this project (along with two other planner-related DIYs) on the Imagine blog (Triad of Planner Awesomeness).

Evolution of a DIY Planner {video}

Creative Business

This one’s for all my planner fans out there, you know who you are!

DIY Planner Evolution

Back in September I shared my Fabric Fauxdori Cover video and promised that I would go more into what’s inside it at a future date. Of course, then October and the Halloween madness struck, and now it’s November and I haven’t fulfilled that promise yet! Allow me to fix that.

(Direct link for the feed readers: DIY Planner Evolution + Clean and Simple Plan with Me November)

The decision to decorate your planner is apparently fraught with peril. As much as I love stickers, I have a lot to keep track of, so I dress my planner up in small ways like with the washi on the page edges. Another benefit of that washi? It reinforces the edges of the paper, making the planner a bit sturdier (at least in my experience). And I’m still absolutely loving my faux-dori planner cover and how easy it is to work with and add things to–I don’t miss ring binders at all!

For anyone still on the hunt for their 2016 planner, the Creative Days Monthly/Weekly Planner is available now in my Etsy shop.

If you want to try your hand at creating your own planner, you can do it in just about any program (Word, Publisher) but I really do prefer InDesign (Scribus is a good open-source alternative). It helps to start by figuring out what you want in a planner–sometimes that means trying out a lot of them or just doodling your own in a spare notebook to find out what sort of information you really need to keep track of. As I said in the video, my biggies are

  • daily to-do lists
  • blog posts
  • menu planning

with fixed appointments only an occasional thing in my life. So all the planners out there that are 50% or more time slots? Not for me. I noticed, back on my hunt for a 2012 planner that started me down the DIY road, that the planners with menu sections were either geared towards moms or had an overly simplified week on a page layout (or other froufrou decorations that didn’t suit me). Of course, had the planner community been then what it is now (or had I known of it), maybe those not-quite-right planners could have benefited from some serious sticker action!

Whatever format you choose to use, I really think everyone can benefit from some sort of time management system. Whether it’s a bullet journal, ongoing to-do lists, even chore charts–whatever takes the guesswork out of the day is going to help you get more done. And it’s not just about making more money and being more productive at work or in your business, it’s about making time for the fun stuff, too. If you check off those boxes for the things you need to do, then you can do the things you want to do with less (or better yet, absolutely no) guilt!

Do you plan? If so, what sort of system do you use? If not, why not?