Stickers for My Journal

We recently got in a bunch of new vinyl stickers from Stay Home Club, and I love them! They are so much fun. They would make an excellent stocking stuffer or something to include in a letter to a pen pal, or just a little pick-me-up for someone in your office or life or book club, etc. Maybe you’ve seen them in the shop—I love seeing the little shelves of them all lined up, ready for a new home.

These new Stay Home Club vinyl stickers are especially great because they are, apparently, dishwasher safe, and Caleb and Naomi have each picked one for their water bottles.

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Over the last year or two or three, I’ve been slowly acquiring a small collection of vinyl stickers, which has slowly morphed into bringing small selections into the shop. On the stationery spectrum between fun and useful, this leans one way pretty heavily, but you can only be so useful in life before it starts to give out on you.

I put stickers or shipping labels or the surprises that life offers me onto the covers of whatever journal I’m using at that moment. It’s satisfying to slowly see my cover accumulate decoration over the weeks and months it journeys with me, usually a parallel to how many pages inside of the notebook have been filled as well. Life has a way of digging up treasures for me that I can’t always anticipate: Sometimes I glance at an old journal and I remember a piece of who I was or where I was when I was writing in it.

Every time I start a new journal, one of my favourite rituals is to sift through my precious stickers and choose one to look forward to seeing every time I open the cover of my journal. There was some element of past me that was potentially too frugal or I felt like it was too wasteful to be haphazard with these higher quality vinyl stickers, but as I’ve begun affixing them to my journals, I’ve come to embrace these stickers to represent some season of life or the period of time for that journal or planner, and actually the chosen stickers become even more valuable for me, guardians of the stories within.

I love my collection of them. My collections of filled up notebooks, of the stickers on the covers of them, of stickers ready and waiting to be used. They’re seasonal or trendy or funny or fun and I love choosing one that will be prescient or ironic or silly or nothing at all, just a sticker for the sake of having it there.