Zebra Mildliner Highlighters

We are keeping up with the back to school theme. This is actually our theme year round, but I mean, September is our time to shine.*

For those of you back in the classroom, planners, office people, or just people who like to highlight things, we got in another shipment of the Zebra Mildliners, along with a few other things from Zebra. We've had them in stock at the Studio Shop on and off for a while, and they've been so popular (and hard to keep in stock!) that we've brought them in to the Main Shop and also online.

Rather than the classic bright, fluorescent highlighters that can sometimes be a bit harsh or saturated, these Mildliners feature more pastel and “milder” ink colours. There are three sets: a fluorescent, a warm and a cool. My personal preference is for the warm set, although it could just be fall.

They are also double-ended—one end a chisel tip, the other end pointed—which is great for highlighting different font sizes, underlining, or making notes.

Sometimes standard office highlighters have harsher, bright fluorescent ink that can bleed through some paper types, but these highlighters are a bit more gentle. Obviously paper that does well with fountain pen ink handles the ink here exceptionally well, but other kinds of paper also tend to fare pretty okay, including thin Bible paper, or the paper in “regular” books, like paper backs (as opposed to glossier textbook paper).

There’s lots to come! We just received the first of our Superior Labor shipments, and the first of our pre-orders are shipping out. If you don’t receive your shipping notification soon, your item is likely in one of the next shipments from Japan.

With the fall, and in anticipation of the holidays, there are lots of new products and shipments coming in. It’s been an exciting and glorious sort of re-entry, to catch up on all that I’ve missed and continue with ongoing projects, and of course, keep up with the blog. In this vast and Wild West of independent shops and the stationery market, it sometimes seems like if you stop to take a breath, you might go under, everyone is swooping around trying to stay alive. And so we are trying not to take too many breaths. But also just enough breaths to also stay alive. It’s a balance. Here I am in a blog post about highlighters talking about breathing strategies. It’s what you come here for, I know.

On we forge. I’m usually here at the studio shop with the kids and animals, orchestrating snacks and laundry upstairs while occasionally surfacing in the studio shop downstairs to help out, while most of the action—shipments, meetings, shipping, Letter Writing Club, animated discussions about our favourite customers—seems to happen at the main shop.

Waiting for Jon to come home with exciting new goodies is a testament to how much more my patience needs to improve.

***

In other news, along the same vein, life continues to move along at a clip. I can hardly keep up. We’ve been celebrating a very extended sort of birthday season for Caleb, which has been lovely, if full of sugar and toys. I suppose that’s what childhood is all about, although I’m more of a hide-upstairs-with-a-book type.

Naomi, though, seems prepared for any celebration that involves a good cupcake.

*We actually try really hard to be shiny year round.