Stationery Magpie is gearing up to restart this Wednesday, April 28, 2010!
So NEW! So SHINY! So POSTED!
So, let’s talk about Knock Knock.
Bias up front as always my dear readers, I freaking love Knock Knock. I love everything Knock Knock makes. I love everything Knock Knock touches. I love Knock Knock because Knock Knock makes the most smartassed stationery I’ve ever seen in my life.
(Okay, quick time out. Have I ruined the magic of the words Knock Knock for you yet, readers? Because I feel like maybe I have. Quite honestly I’m feeling a bit like punching the next person who starts up a knock knock joke… Let’s abbreviate Knock Knock down to KK for all of our sanity’s sake from here in shall we? Sharp! I knew you’d agree. RESUMING BLOG!)
Now let me tell you that KK makes a LOT of stuff.
No, I mean A LOT.
They make file folders, they make stickynotes, they make clips… they make so many kinds of notepads and checklists that I could make an entire entry JUST focusing on those alone (which I probably will one day!)
And all of the above are notoriously witty – the kind of thing you pick up that just makes you smile looking at it. The first KK product I ever got my hands on was an ‘All Out Of…’ shopping checklist that gave you spaces to tick off everything you’d run out of over the week so you could replace it. It was ridiculously useful and I went looking for more things from the same company and found a slew of quirky little charmers with check boxes all over them!
oh god someone find me a pen! now
Now, I come from LiveJournal, the land where people put up polls with OMG TICKYBOX!! as a standard option irregardless of the content of the poll, because we’re LJ and we love three things. Drama, icons and mothereffing TICKYBOXES!
So when I find a sticky note that looks like THIS? —>
Yeah that squeaking noise that you thought was your eardrums popping or something just now? That was me, squealing in glee.
Needless to say I went looking for more and found it catalouged extensively on a beautifully designed website that features along with a bucketful of tickyboxes (eee!) FREE E-CARDS! (How cool is that?!!)
Today though what I really want to talk about is the KK products I’ve USED extensively, not just squealed over in the store and online. I want to talk about the things KK makes that keep my day to day life in check.
These things are simple, neatly organized and most of all unspeakably and irreplaceably awesome to my picky little mind. They are…. *DRUMROLL* … The 5 Days A Week Paper Mouse Pad and two out of a series of adorable Pocket Notes, the one for Great Ideas and the one for Money Spent.
.
and now you all know my school schedule
This is my five days a week planner mouse pad. It keeps track of EVERYTHING for me and what I loved the most about this when I saw it is that it lets me build my own time slots. My day isn’t cut off as beginning and ending at nine and five or seven and six or anything. You can just write the timing of things in yourself! Your list of to dos and appointments can have a different range of hours from day to day if you want, and considering how unstructured my life is with classes all over the place for my university courses that’s something I appreciate to an insane degree.
There are checkboxes at the bottom of each day that let you know you’ve defeated another day of the work week, ranging from ‘One Down’ (Monday) to ‘Hump Surmounted’ (Wednesday) and all the way down to ‘TGIF’! The bottom of the page is taken up with notes for what to do this weekend, next week, and whenever hell happens to freeze over. =)
For someone like me who really needed my school-week managed and who was frustrated with trying to fit it into a calendar where I had to write small vs a planning book where I had no week to week layout that went ACROSS the page the way I am used to reading out my week off of the aforementioned calendar with it’s very small squares, this mouse pad was a dream to find.
because inspiration is frequently inconvenient
My pocket notes on the contrary are less about forethought and all about capturing ideas in the moments and keeping track of myself. Part of my notebook-seeking nature comes from the fact that without fail I always get an AMAZING idea when I have nothing on me to write it down with.
These little notebooks are maybe 0.75cm thick and around the size of my hand from the heel of my palm to my first knuckles. Each page inside tears off beautifully from the bunch making it easy to pass on things (especially with the ‘great ideas’ pads) and the insides are just beautifully laid out.
The Money Spent book is blissfully simple, with columns laid out for the date, what you spent your dough on, and how much the damage was – with a slot at the top to put in your starting balance to work from even! Great Ideas, comparatively, gives you a spot to rank your idea’s greatness on a scale of one to five, and then to mark down whether or not you DID anything with the idea using tickyboxes with the options ‘idea trashed’, ‘idea postponed’ or ‘idea actualized’.
All of the above have saved my butt from certain record-keeping doom at one point or another and therefore I’m sure you can see why the KK collection of stationery has wiggled it’s way in so close to my paper-loving heart.
So, awesome people of Knock Knock, I salute thee. Thanks for giving me the means not to forget about my test, not to go broke on snacks after the test, and not to forget that great idea I had for a poem about the amazingness of Doritos.
For now, it’s time to go check what’s on the roster for tomorrow!
…..
Oh crap I have to be up at 9:00 tomorrow and its 4:00am. I think I should be going to bed now…
NEXT WEEK : CARDS! How to purchase holographic Iron Man valentines without shame when you are twenty three years old!
Until then, fly true fellow magpies!
Most stationery lovers have pocket-sized notebooks. They take something to write on with them wherever they go, and make no mistake I do that too! But there is just… something about a really big notebook – something 11 x 8 or even larger – that makes my little writer’s heart go all squishy inside at the sight of it. All those big blank pages, openly inviting me to fill them up with scores on scores of words.
Last week in my local Chapters I finally stumbled upon the sort of large notebook I had been pining after for literally years. Finding large notebooks is easy, finding them with the sort of narrow ruled lines that I prefer in my notebooks is much different.
There’s a standard line height in most notebooks that I have learned to deal with but prefer to escape. It’s the standard for most spiral bound books for schools and the like – 0.75 cm – and many non-school-geared notebooks even increase to 0.85 cm or 1 cm.
pretty black cover
Moleskine’s A4 Folio Ruled Notebook spaces it’s lines at a deliciously compact 0.60 cm which was enough to make my eyes pop and make my boyfriend laugh at my expression when I first opened up the book after pulling it off the shelf.
Now let me air my biases here – I love Moleskine books in general specifically because of this line-spacing thing – even their pocket-sized books have 0.60 cm spacing and given how much I loathe the idea of writing giant scrawling words in a tiny little book having lines that force my font to stay small (because my letter sizing tends to run away with me when I get really into something) is pretty much the icing on the cake for me as notebooks go. But before I found this folio I was somehow wholly unaware that Moleskine MADE books this big, which is why it came as such an amazing surprise to get my hands on this one.
pretty narrow lines
Also, part of what I love about Moleskine as a brand is that they cater to more than just people who want to write shit down. This folio size book comes in a blank paged edition for those who like to sketch, paint, or just take notes more freehand or with diagrams. Their smaller books come in an insane variety of styles for all different types of artists and creators in general, including books formatted with graph grids, storyboard boxes and even music! Although I will never personally have a need for a panoramic style watercolour book, I’ll be damned if the existence of such a thing doesn’t make me smile from ear to ear.
Moleskine’s are more on the expensive side for notebooks ($25 USD roughly for the ruled and blank folios) but their craftsmanship is excellent – I’ve never personally had one that’s worn out without me giving it a truly vicious beating that few things made of paper would survive anyway – and I find them to be, for the most part, very worth the money I spend on them.
In conclusion, line spacing is far too important to me, Moleskine loves artists of all stripes, and I – as an artist of the writerly stripe – love me some Moleskine books.
Now if you will excuse me, I have pages to fill!
Hi.
My name is Zippy.
I have an addiction.
For as long as I can remember, I have been in love with bookstores. Since I was a little girl I’ve loved their peaceful atmosphere, the smell of the paper, their neat organized rows and the way it was easy to find things, the beautiful displays, the bookmarks, the pastel colors of the hanging signs, and now that I’m grown nothing about that magic has decreased. In fact it is even better because bookstores are starting to cross over with my other great shopping love, which is much harder to appreciate aesthetically, and stranger still emotionally, for the person looking at my little obsession from the outside in.
Bookstores are set to attract even passing customers. People come there for joy not for necessity. They are a pastime not a professional requirement. Office supply stores on the other hand, are the sorts of places that people go to because they ran out of toner, or they need a new desk chair, or they need to upgrade some software, or they are making a very serious purchase of a printer or a laptop or a desktop. In short, they go because they HAVE to.
But office supply stores, inexplicably to most people I encounter, are the sorts of places that I go just for the fun of it.
I should not be left unattended in an office store. Turn your back on me in an Office Max, a Grand and Toy, or god forbid a Staples and when you find me again I will be flat broke and dithering in a pile of sticky notes like a toddler that’s been dropped in a ball pit.
I can roam an office store for hours, fussing over pencils and markers and erasers, humming and hawing about the layouts of day planners, calendars, and account books that I have no business buying but want anyway because they are so very pretty… I’m like a clothes whore for things that are not clothes. Few people I’ve met have shared my love to to degree that I do. Friends of mine appreciate a nice notebook or a good pen, but not with the extreme glee that I do.
I think maybe I get so excited about these things just because the physical writing down and drawing of things is a memory map to me. I read something and remember not just writing it but what I was doing, how I was feeling, what day it was, what was going on in my life that influenced the words. I have the same sentimentality about some electronic communications – letters friends have sent me by e-mail and livejournal posts I’ve read… but it’s not the same as the ring of seeing sincere word penned by a person’s own hand. I save even the most frivolous things that have been written down for me just because of that.
For years I carried in my wallet a piece of paper with a note from my mother where she had slipped a twenty into my purse with a note folded up around it, written in her neat handwriting – ‘thank you for doing the housework, enjoy your movie’.
I have few words to explain why it was so sentimental to me. Yes it was a one-time spontaneous moment of thoughtfulness from a woman I love very much – but having it immortalized on a scrap of paper made it mean so much more. She took the time to write it down, set aside a moment to put it down on paper so that I would read it and in the same breath so that I would always have it to read. I know the indelible nature of it probably wasn’t on her mind when she wrote it down but regardless in magnified the meaning of my mother’s gesture to me.
My own writing acts just the same to me sometimes. Even the smallest scrap notes mean the biggest things to my memory because it gives a solid focus to a place where I’ve once been in my mind, in my emotions, in my life. In writing down anything I provide myself a time line to look back on.
Now at 23 years old I have boxes full of notebooks. I’ve been writing in them since I was six or seven years old, carrying one around with me at all times for at least the last decade ‘just in case I get an idea’. I quest constantly for a really good notebook – one that meets the criteria of preferences that I’ve built up over the years – and dither wildly over the gems I find among the masses. Stationary stores – big and small – and bookstores that carry stationery are my joy and comfort year round.
I think it’s fair to say that I’ve accepted my obsession. It has a carefully cultivated little place in my heart and it’s easy now to brush off other people who just don’t get it or tell me I already have too many. (Nonsense. There’s no such thing!) I love my notebooks, and my pens and my stickies, and they love me back every time they remind me of something.
And at least, as addictions go, it’s less expensive than clothes.
Or crack.
