Planner Stickers | Simple. I Just Do.

This is a planner post, but it’s a little more than that.

Those of us that are into planners and planning know that people make money off of us. Big money. The planners themselves aren’t cheap (I’m looking at you, Erin Condren), and then the accessories… Holy Cow. Search Pinterest for Planner accessories and you’ll see what I mean. There are hundreds of people on eBay who just sell planner stickers. Planner Stickers! And when you add in shipping… well, let’s just say I’ve never felt comfortable spending that much on a consumable, and especially now that it would cost me the better part of a day’s pay for a couple of sheets of stickers…

So what’s a girl to do? All I wanted was a set of stickers to put on days when bills are due.

I started looking at some neato stamps by l2e, but the neato stamps were at least $14 a set. Add in the shipping, the ink… Not consumable, but still pricy.

Then I went to iconic fonts – the sometimes-free fonts you can download from enterprising young graphic designers that are like tiny little pictures. I thought if I could find a set that had the icons I wanted, I could put them into a word document, or even a label template and print them out. But it was difficult to find the icons I wanted, especially for free. Those pesky young graphic designers want to be paid, too.

And then I found this, by Mike Rohde, which are actually some hand drawn bullet journal icons. At first I thought, “Those are really cool, and kind of what I want, but I can’t draw!”

No, seriously. I can’t draw. I used to prepare my students for this fact the few times I had to draw things on the board, and they still laughed. I explained that this is why I was a music teacher… Can’t draw to save my life.

But.

I came across another pin, recommending Sara Zorel on YouTube. One of her videos was called “Doodle With Me: Planner Icons”. Now, doodle I can do. So when you say “Doodle,” I think I can like that tiny blue engine that could…

And with some practice in my moleskine, I did.

I bought a flag shaped punch on clearance at Walmart for $3, and I already had sticker paper (In fact, had scraps of it from my NaNoWriMo prep – more on that later), and so I colored the scraps with markers, punched out some flags, and started doodling.

It may seem small, but I am totally geeked that I can make for myself and not spend money unnecessarily. And that I can kinda sorta draw. Not people, though. That’s just scary.

Shift your paradigm, and when you say to yourself, “I can’t,” question it. Sometimes you can amaze yourself.

If you have an Erin Condren planner and are on Pinterest, you’ll find lots of stickers to purchase out there, but they can get expensive, and they may not say just what you want them to. A pack of stickers from a craft store that are not even sized to fit the squares in the Erin Condren planner can run you five or six bucks, and to me that’s a lot to spend on something that’s not quite right.

While on Pinterest, I found this handy post on how to use Picmonkey, a free online photo editing tool, to create your own stickers. Ms. Marcia Beckett does an excellent job explaining how to re-purpose Picmonkey to make a sheet of cut-yourself stickers. And luckily, I had purchased some full-sheet sticker paper from Staples last fall. A package of that can get expensive, too. But with coupons and watching for sales, I think I got mine for about $12, and it has lasted me quite awhile.

But I didn’t want any old random stickers.

Like many people, I have a board on Pinterest with Quotes that resonate with me, some funny, some inspiring, and these are what I wanted sprinkled through the pages of my planner. I googled to see if anyone else had done this before, and couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for. I decided to play around with it myself. Here are the steps I followed:

1. Open Pinterest, and find the pins you want to make into stickers. I recommend pins that have a lot of space on each side, and are more vertical than horizontal, but you can play with it yourself to get the look you want. Once you click on your pin, right click on it to save it as an image.

2. Open picmonkey, and follow the instructions in Marcia’s post above. You can add more pictures by dragging them onto your layout, and waiting until a grey area appears. Then simply drop your picture. You can also resize them by dragging the sides of each picture you have placed.

3. I would recommend putting 16 pictures on an 8.5 x 11 page to get close to the size of the boxes in the Erin Condren planner. You can eyeball the sizing to get it fairly close to the right proportions.

4. Adjust your spacing to around 127 to get the pictures to the right size on the background page (the icon looks like an art palette on the left of the Picmonkey page).

5. Print and cut out!

A couple of notes:

Don’t try to make a buck off of other people’s designs. That’s stealing. Using these for personal use is one thing, but using someone else’s work to create stickers to sell would not be the right thing to do.
I wouldn’t recommend using people’s designs from Etsy or other sites where people are trying to make a living from their work.
If you have some pins/quotes that won’t work due to the layout, you can always create a new one using Picmonkey, as well! It really is a lot of fun!