I came to a few realizations this year about my relationship with stickers, and wanted to share this journey here to see if any of y’all can relate or have come up with your own solutions:
- I love stickers. Always have, always will. The nostalgia of collecting stickers as a kid will never go away and I don’t even want to try and resist buying them. I don’t work as hard as I do, to NOT spend a few bucks on a thing that makes me happy.
- I’m too stingy about using my stickers. I’m afraid to use them, which leads to under-utilizing them.
- I don’t actually like sticker-heavy layouts, which combined with #2 means I used my collection sparingly and haphazardly.
The problem
When I flip through my old planners and journals they have stickers randomly and sparsely placed here and there and I wish I’d not used any stickers at all. So I’ve basically been torn between my love for cute adhesive things and my preference for an ink-only aesthetic.
My light bulb moment for 2024:
This is actually a false binary! My issue is that I don’t like stickers all over my notebooks, and I don’t like random sticker usage. So what if I just decorate the sh*t out of a small number of pages in my book, and use ink only for the rest of it?
The result
I’m happy to report, this strategy has worked and is making me very happy!
I basically unload entire sticker sheets onto themed monthly pages in my Hobonichi A6 techo, which makes the months super festive and gets me in the mood for whatever is to come, while my daily pages are ink only. I get the best of both worlds and honestly, the stickers look great together because seeing them together on a sheet is usually what attracts me to them anyway. I’ve released my need to use the stickers sparingly and horde them for who knows what, and instead I will use them all up and make room to buy more. Wins all around!
Pictured: Festive lunar new year set up for February and trying to bring some joy into some home renovations I need to do in the second half of April
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