Midori D-Clips Paper Clips

These days have been busy and full and there's lots going on here. Maybe it's having the baby, maybe it's having a business where it's all hands on deck all the time, but every day is something new. We've been busy getting online orders out, but also trying to organize and re-organize here so we can be lean and mean, but our pile of boxes-to-be-sorted-later is just getting bigger. A regular customer of ours said we should do thing where we put all of the boxes in storage for 6 months, and whatever is left that we haven't retrieved for use yet, we just throw out. I know I'm a procrastinator, but that is too daunting for me just yet - I mean, there could be good ink in some of those boxes! We took Super to the dog park on Monday where he got his tennis ball stolen by a corgi about 30 seconds into a game of fetch. Super walked for a while around looking lonesome and pitiful, but found a new friend pretty quickly. Those corgis may have short legs, but they're fast... and also Super is not very well-coordinated. The baby has learned this thing where he likes certain food and he doesn't like other food. He's been feeding himself for a while, which I initially thought was the greatest advancement he's made yet because it meant I could eat/read/cook/fold laundry while he was fingering up all those Cheerios - I didn't even have to get my hands dirty! However, Caleb has recently discovered he can now feed himself whatever he wants, meaning of course only the tasty bits. Even if you hide some lumps of that horrible tasting tofu in a mash of cheese and banana, cleverly similar in colour and shape, by the end of lunch, he will have eaten all of the cheese and banana, with all of that tired old tofu sitting on his tray. And potentially around smeared around his face. Jon says he learned this picky-eating from me, which is ridiculous, since as an adult, I now only purchase and cook foods that I am willing to eat, and therefore I eat everything on my plate. In the shop, we've been working hard on ordering to re-stock low and out of stock items from our regular lines. Things were all over the place as we moved - some things showed out of stock online, but we had a whole box, and sometimes it was the opposite. We've been getting shipments in and we're counting and inventorying everything up. And we are also getting a few new items in! These we ordered quite a while ago (a lot of our overseas, in particular Japanese, items we need to order pretty far in advance), and they've just arrived. We got a big shipment of Midori items - although no new Blue Midori stock yet! The first of these new items that we're getting online are these adorable Midori D-Clips or paper clips. Jon says I'm not allowed to put these on any of the papers we have to organize for our accountant for taxes, so she takes us more seriously. But how can I resist.

We have two sizes - the small ones come in a box of thirty, and then larger ones that come in a pack of four. For these smaller ones, I was originally thinking I'd be all over the elephants, because you know elephants are just beautiful and gorgeous and funny looking but I'm really liking the airplane and also the crocodile. Also, the hippo and whale. And the turtle.

  They come in a box of 30, and even the box is kind of cute! It slides open, and I'm sure you could find a few ways to re-use the box once you're empty, maybe holding extra nibs or sorting different sizes of cartridges? The large ones come in a pack of four, by theme - vehicle, aquarium and zoo.

The large ones are great for all kinds of things: they obviously hold more paper together - it says up to 20 sheets on the back, but in Japanese, so it's a bit of a decoding game here. At the very least, they are sturdy enough to attach onto the leather cover of a Midori or another notebook. You can also use these large ones as bookmarks for reading, or a way to mark sections or important pages in your notebooks you need to refer to. The larger clips are pretty heavy, so you can also use this to hold a few pages together to weigh them down if you have your book open for reading hands-free.

And actually, these are would make great enclosures (items accompanying a letter) to include with your letters to pen pals or whoever you're writing to, just as a fun surprise - they're flat and can go through the letter mail system. If you are going to send a few, I might recommend sliding them onto your letter or paper, so they don't end up all bunched loose in a corner, making it hard to go through a machine. *With Canada Post, the letter mail has size and weight restrictions, and while it says letters can be no more than 2 cm in thickness, it is also for items that are totally flat and are acceptable going through mail sorting machines or rollers. This is part of why lettermail is so inexpensive. Once you get into parcel mail or sending packages, your postage rate goes way up. Lots is happening here! Every once in a while a customer catches us at the right with the pot of tea, and we clear off some space on the back table to chat. It's a bit hairy because they can see all of our piles of paper and things we're supposed to taking pictures of or I'm supposed to be testing out and blogging about, but it's a wonderful kind of busy. I'll be writing more soon about some of the other new Midori things we've got in. Blue Midoris will be coming soon, I'm hoping in July, and we are expecting more Edison Pens any day now. We've got some new calligraphy things on the way, so stay tuned for that. Also, we're expecting the new J. Herbin 1670 Emeraude of Chivor ink to come sometime in August, which will be very exciting - it's a greenish blue ink with gold sheen. As a side note, I don't have favourite distributors, but if I did, I think the J. Herbin distributor would be the one because they always call me "Madame Chan" in a French accent so I feel all important.