I'm crazy

Because I'm weirdly obsessed with cataloging things, I counted up and made a list of all the notecards I have.

I found out that I have 145 notecards. I plan on marking off every time I use one, because, as I said before, I'm crazy.  I did not count up postcards, or any of my holiday specific cards... Christmas, Halloween, Valentine's Day...

I also looked at my mail log and counted up how many items I send a year. In 2015 I sent 203. In 2016 I sent 143. In October and December I think I almost exclusively send holiday mail, but it's kind of exciting to think that if I only sent regular notecards that I would use them all up in a year.

Anybody else completely nerd out over mail like this?

Self-Print Stationery

Christmas cards and winter themed stationery are pretty common and easy to find, but I wanted to give a little love to the holiday of Thanksgiving, so I ended up designing my own stationery on Microsoft Publisher (the same program I used when I was 10 to write my own "newspaper", PawPrints).  

Anyway, here are the results:

I don't have access to a color printer so I used some colored paper to spice things up.
The turkey image I believe I got from Pugly Pixel, but I can't remember. In any case it's not mine. :-) The pages are half the size of normal printer paper.

This next set I made from Letterheady.  They show photos of famous people's actual letterhead, which is why there is a Kansas City address on here. I merely copied the photo and printed it out.  These sheets are quite small because when I tried to blow it up larger it got a little fuzzy.
Mini gift for my boyfriend, since he loves Calvin & Hobbes.

Not sure about the legal parts of doing this, but I'm not making money off of it, just pleasing myself, so I don't think it's a problem.

Idea for sheets of stationery

I've read several blogs this year with people bemoaning the scarcity of sheets of stationery paper.  Notecards are definitely plentiful, but I agree it has been harder to find stationery sheets.

Well, I've discovered a way to get lots of sheets of decorated stationery for a real bargain!

Just buy a journal with decorated pages!
There are lots of nice journals with decorated pages that cost only about 10 to 15 dollars.  For this amount of money you get so much paper!
Journals that are bound with rings or have perforations on their pages are the best for this, but if you have an exacto knife, you can easily cut down the side of the page for journals that are more sturdily bound.

I started out doing this with a journal that I had started and then abandoned. It had pretty blue peacocks on the paper.  I didn't want to waste it, so I put it to use!

This is the first journal I've bought specifically for the purpose of using it as stationery:

 

I found a couple of journals on line, but the best way to find a good one is to go to your bookstore, because lots of online stores don't show the inside pages of journals. Stupid, I know.

Of course, they don't come with envelopes, but I use them mostly for when I'm writing on a notecard and run out of space. And of course you can always make your own envelopes or buy a cheap pack to decorate!

Outgoing: 2-21-2011