Stationery from Pigeonhole

My association with stationery store Typo has finally taken hold on me and I have the urge to buy some pretty paper, write things by hand again and abandon the computer age. I'm not sure whether it's guilt or me trying to see whether my staff discount is still applicable, but all the same before I meet with a picnic with friends tomorrow I'll head off bright and early tomorrow to buy some lovely book bags as well as a leather satchel if I can make my wallet stretch that far. I'm going to seek out some lovely and thin Exercise books in pretty colours as well to make some hash up scratch books and scrap together my favourite extracts from Vogue.

Another stationery supplier apart from my old store that's located online is something you may already know of; the store that seems to be the source of my paper envy is Pigeonhole Shop and I'm fairly certain I've mentioned before but haven't yet included some of their cute stationery and cards. All of the images have been taken from their website so if you like what you see, jump onto your mouse and get clicking through their website to find some more gorgeous goodies.

This cute little item is simply named 'The Folding Pocket', maybe I'm attracted to the contrast of mint green and dark brown reminding me of chocolate mint ice cream. I'm a little unsure whether the seam along the front which we can see from the photograph opens up and the dimensions of the piece but you could use it as a little pencil case and cram in the essentials. It could even house a very thin and wiry pair of anorexic sunglasses.

The item I'm most interested is the Travel Kit in Bon Voyage; my biggest gripe with this site is the minimal amount of photographs of their products as well as the confusing photographs of their products. It's all very well and good to throw in a few other things that are similar to the product you're selling but if the name of the product is ambiguous you can't really be too sure what you're buying. At $12.50. I'd be happy to shell out the dollars and have something neat to hold on to for when I next travel which should be 2013 to Band in Canada and the Rockies.

As an on-again-off-again hobby photographer I would never turn down a photo album, especially one with such a cute colour scheme and neat illustration. Scoping through the sales items of the online store Pigeonhole has got to be one of my favourite pastimes but I haven't yet ordered anything. I keep trying to save my pennies for something big and spectacular and also reminding myself that I potentially have a 50% discount to my name. As soon as that gives out or I see something that I'm clamouring to get my hands on I bet I'll cave in to these wicked desires.

Cute little illustrations like this are a sobering reminder that my own drawing skills, while looking promising when I was young has turned to shit in recent years. I guess something had to give when I wanted to become a vet over being a cartoonist so while I spent a lot of my time drawing as a child. That's sadly come to an end, but now I rather I now write as opposed to drawing and holding a pencil in my hand. While I do like focusing my attention on a few things at a time, I wish I was a little more of a jack-of-all-trades and hadn't let my artistic side whither and die in high school. For someone who did have a lot of angst and hatred aimed at the world and in every direction, my drawings and everything else sucks.

 

It seems everything chic and kitsch that I like is written in French, including these illustrative cards from Pigeonhole, some Rebound books which are recycled diaries and also books from Olympia Le-Tan! I clearly picked the wrong language to study during high school but it's still not too late for me because I may be able to take a TAFE or adult learning class- I'm sure there are also numerous phrase books for travellers and a book along the lines of 'French for Dummies' or something similar.

Handmade books

For the first time in my life I have a very cool diary but I haven't really used it at all and that's sort of depressing really. I've been very busy typing at the speed of light as my mother would say and cataloguing gorgeous brands, jewellery and fashion on my blog to fully take up the written arts again. Occasionally when suffering writer's block I'll set about scrawling notes in a book given to me on my birthday last year and then type those up properly but that's as far as things have gotten when it comes to writing things out.

Still, it would be nice to be able to write things out in my own hand writing and put together clippings from magazines as well as photographs. For my boyfriend, I filled in a book from Listography, 'My Love Life in Lists' and that was about one hundred and fifty pages to fill out but some of them weren't applicable. I have to fill in some more the next time I see him but I should write down some vague notes in my diary to jog my memory when I do have the chance to write in his book for him. That's about the most writing I've done this Summer, neatly and with effort.

I had aimed to accomplish so much this Summer as I do every year and though I always fall short, I accomplish something in some small way. I had meant to learn to roughly do water colour and write in cool fonts but that had never come to fruition really. There's still time though and not all hope has been lost. It will just be a little more difficult since I'll now be preparing to head off to university in the next few weeks as well.

The diary I had purchased for this year was from a company called Rebound books and they take old Little Golden books and splice them open, insert diary dates and spiral bound them to make into diaries. I got one mainly to keep up to date with university and since nothing really spectacular has happened this year so far I haven't had much to write in it sadly. There's quite a few blank pages so I suppose I should do rough drawings and sketches of things I blogged about during the week, or print out excerpts of my blog and stick it in with the date. I'm not too sure how much effort I can be bothered with writing the same things out twice, but at least it might give a little flavour to my diary and make it special. I want it to be thick and jam-packed full of stuff. If I had any sense, I would lock myself in my room and read through magazines and clip stuff out of them as well as try badly to draw things from my blog from a frozen screen.

I'm very tempted to turn the blank pages of my diary into something like this- while I doubt I will be graced with the good luck to find as many lovely looking magazine clippings as this if my family were to finally upgrade to a better printer than I could print out extracts here and there of this blog and do up the pages myself. I'm digging the pink and purple painted pages and the rough hand drawn borders, it's all very home made and sweet. I have been dedicating a lot of my time to writing online so I can share it with others who have the same opinion as me, but I can't help but feel that I'm missing the all important process of writing things for myself and in secret and getting to hug a diary close to my chest at night. I was never the kind of girly girl who wrote all her thoughts in secret under the torch of her bed sheets and the crushes of her names and what happened daily, but I wish I had been. Or that I could become that girl now.

While writing in three-dimensional clunky blocks isn't difficult, I can never really bring myself to finish writing say, a diary or writing in a notebook. I always give up halfway through because I have a change of heart and no longer agree with my ideas in it anymore or I hate my handwriting. When I first write in a book everything looks so neat and cute but as I get further into it I get lazy and careless. At least with an online journal the presentation is the same and remains in the same, neat font all the way through no matter how tired and worn out I feel.

This year I'm in half the mind to take on an additional TAFE course or an adult learning class on either an Asian language, Japanese perhaps or a photography course so I can actually hone my craft. It would be a lot of fun to learn how to write characters in an Asian language and when I see the advertisement for Apple iPads I always feel a pang of poverty. I would love to learn things as I go through the year and devote my spare diary pages to learning a foreign language. I think that should be my next task when I next go to the library.

YSL Arty Ovale rings.