A friend commissioned this fabulous blank notebook for writing recipes in. Love the cover paper she chose! I cut out a section and added a title on the front.
It’s a mere two weeks before I will be jetting off on a family holiday to Positano, Italy, for some much needed rest and relaxation.
Of course I will be taking a notebook and pen/pencil with me, but sometimes it just doesn’t cut it to simply have a couple of items loose in the bottom of my bag. This, I feel, will be one such holiday and I will need something a bit nicer; a grown-up pencil case, basically, so I can keep all my stationery essentials handy, compact and tidy.
And so I explored the web to find the best travel stationery sets I could. Here’s what I discovered…
Having written the line about wanting something grown-up, it turns out that one of the best little all-round sets I stumbled upon is in fact a Hello Kitty one. It has a ballpoint pen, pencil, ruler, eraser, notepad, felt tips, plus (and this is what makes it so good) a sharpener that catches the shavings. I feel this is essential for a travel set, when you won’t know if there’ll be bin handy. You can get it from Tesco and it’s pretty darn cute:
If, however, you’re looking for something a bit more upmarket, why not try this travel set in a fancy leather case? According to the site it’s “A luxurious way to carry all your stationery essentials”:
Just want to do a bit of sketching on your holidays? There are quite a few sketching wallets about. This one’s from Derwents and contains a sketch pad of nice paper, nice pencils/charcoal etc., an eraser and a sharpener:
This little set from Ryman’s is pretty handy, with just the basics of nice pencils, erasers and that all important sharpener. This one not all collects the bits, but it has different sharpening sizes for drawing/writing etc. Who knew these existed? Not me! This one’s also nice and compact, with good quality erasers that sit nicely over the tops of the pencils:
Now that you’ve got together the right set of pencils/pens etc. you’ll need something to put them in. Good old Paperchase has a great selection, ranging from eco-friendly wooden ones to nice soft zip-up ones, both plain and patterned:
And finally, for any of you hardcore crafters out there, why not try making your own from this awesome tutorial?
A while back I did a post on ‘things with buttons’ and featured this teeny little button book:
So cute! And such a great idea. I’ve been wanting to make my own for quite some time now and I finally got round to it.
The idea I had for it is taken from something I’ve had in mind for a while now: “He is always dancing with me…” is a line that’s been kicking around my ideas book as something that I want to illustrate, and finally with this miniature button book I’ve incorporated it into something.
I would like to make more for my Folksy shop but I’m not entirely sure what I would market them as! ideas?!
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Customised stationery set
When my friend Helen won the letter writing competition I recently ran, I assumed that she’d commission me to do robots on her prize of a customised letter and envelope set. However, when I asked what she’d like, she said she’d need some time to think about it.
After a few days she got back to me with her request. Could she have robots, please?
I’m really happy with the result!
(I think this guy’s my favourite. Shh.):
These were great fun to design.
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Weekly Inspiration – Craft Gawker
This site is brilliant. As their ‘about’ page says:
“craftgawker is a curated photo gallery that allows the visual search and discovery of handmade arts and crafts to inspire your own projects. we publish photography submitted by craft bloggers from around the world. our editors review submissions daily and choose the highest quality, most creative images to showcase.”
I hate to compare, but to give you an indication- it’s a bit like Pinterest, but specifically for links to tutorials and images of crafty things to inspire you!
There’s a wide range of crafts on here and different sections to choose from – dwelling, food, style etc. – and a great blog too. A real bonus is that as well as being full of fun projects there are also basic, practical tutorials such as how to use a glue gun, using rivets and quilling basics.
So go look, get inspired and then get crafting!
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Stationery competition winner!
It was a close call.
The runner up letter was from my mum- she has lovely neat handwriting and used matching Miffy stationery:
She wrote about the fact that one in five children have never received a letter. Very sad indeed!
The winner, though, was my good friend Helen, who wrote in pink ink and decorated the edges of her letter with blue glitter.
She also recommended an author I’d not heard of – Emma Newman – who I’m looking forward to checking out.
For her customised prize, she has asked me to adorn her writing paper and envelopes with robots!
I’m on it – will post the finished results soon.
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New notebooks
Will be getting some of these up on Folksy soon:
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I love pens
Pencils, too. Writing implements in general, really. Love ’em. And I don’t care who knows it! Yes, it’s National Stationery Week, here at last to help get Britain writing.
It’s actually got me thinking about my own pen collection and how I write, and I’ve come to realise that I’ve neglected things of late. Even though I write often, draw often, always carry a pen with me along with something to write on, I seem to have lost that urge to always write with a beautiful pen, on quality paper, taking the time to write carefully and neatly (though it doesn’t help that most of my writing is done on my rather rickety train journeys to and from work.)
However, I’ve decided it’s time to get back on track! Starting with a good spring clean of my pens, which are all over the place. No more grabbing the first ball-point I see and scribbling things down! To inspire me, I’ve been browsing the internet looking for… well, looking for inspiration. And inspiration I have found:
Is just an awesome pen/writing/stationery-related blog!
“Specialists in classic, hard-to-find and niche pens, pencils and refills from the world’s biggest manufacturers.” A brilliant selection, good for browsing.
Doesn’t have the most enticing website, but gets almost full marks for it’s range of writing implements and the glorious ink ‘Col-o-rama’ (they lost points due to the Americanism – ‘color’ not ‘colour’ – though I agree that they couldn’t exactly have ‘Col-our-ama’). They also have some pretty sexy ink bottles:
Plus the best pencil sharpener EVER:
Moving on slightly from pens and writing… plantable paper! Who knew? Not I. This is a wondrous site dedicated to eco-friendly paper and seed paper:
“Why do we use seed paper in our products? Because seed paper from Botanical PaperWorks is made with post-consumer material, meaning that no new fibers were used in the production of this paper. And because when the paper itself is planted, it composts away leaving only wildflowers (or herbs, or vegetables) and NO WASTE!”
I NEED to get me some paper that turns into flowers.
A lovely shop situated in Bloomsbury, with a wonderful stationery section; but don’t worry if you can’t get there in person, they have an excellent on-line store for your perusing pleasure. As well as some great pencil sets:
They have a fantastic selection of washi tape:
What are your plans for National Stationery Week?
In light of the upcoming National Stationery Week, I’ve decided to run a little competition amongst my Facebook friends (indeed, the ones who are actually my friends!).
All they have to do is post me a hand written letter. That’s the whole brief, they can make of that what they will!
As a prize, the best one will be able to commission me to customise a lovely set of envelopes and note papers.
I will be posting the best entries and of course their customised prize. Watch this space!
While National Stationery Week is a mere 7 days away, I am glad I’ve found out about it at least a little in advance.
As it says on their site, ‘National Stationery Week is a celebration of the written word and all things stationery.’ And just to be clear, that’s stationery with an ‘e’, NOT stationary.
The idea is to encourage more people to write by hand and I for one am all for that. Not just because I want to sell people my notebooks- although actually, that is the main reason I started making them in the first place. I love writing things down, I wanted to do it more often and to create beautiful, fun places to write thoughts/ideas/lists in!
Here, then, are my favourite stationery items from The Craft Fantastic:
Simple, single section notebooks with beautiful paper all the way from Florence:
Japanese stab-bound notebooks with hand-drawn stencils adorning the front:
Delicately detailed A4 landscape notebooks/journals/scrap books:
Fun geometric shapes on simple stab-bindings:
Miniature books, for miniature thoughts:
Fancy Coptic binding:
Beautiful black hardback with a metal key:
Keep your eyes peeled for new stock, plus some goodies especially for NSW!