Planner Stickers - Back on Track

Hello! I'm back! 

It's been a minute, I know. But life got away from me a bit.  I'm working on getting back on track after a few crazy years. 

As I'm sure everyone is aware, there was a global pandemic that hit in March 2020. I was living in student housing provided by an internship while working on my master's. Colleges closed down immediately. I had 12 hours to remove all my stuff and find another place to live. Luckily, both my parents lived nearby, and my at-the-time-bf and I had been talking about moving in together in the summer when the school year ended. We had just looked at a place to rent the day before the college closed down. A frantic afternoon with help from both my parents and bf resulted in all my stuff ending up in my mom's garage, and I stayed with her for about a week while we figured things out. We ended up renting a lovely house together, and moving in earlier than planned. 

The next few years involved getting engaged, buying a house, getting married, adopting a kitten, working from home a lot, trying to commute to SF, getting a new job, learning how to garden, a lot of video games, and just creating a "new normal" overall. 

Obviously, I didn't blog at all during this time. I did craft, though! I documented it on my insta @southrngalincal but have not blogged in a few years. But, that does tend to be my m.o. when busy. 

I must say, I've also neglected my planner the past few years. 

In getting back into planners and things, I was having a hard time finding stickers that fit in the Carpe Diem vertical weekly planner boxes. 

 

Now, I *love* the Happy Planner and Create360 stickers. But they just don't fit! 

After first perusing Etsy, I moved on to Pinterest, where I came across a lovely article showing me how to make stickers with my Cricut machine! 

So I spent the next few days honing my design skills on the Cricut Design Space. 

I majored in journalism, with a penchant for page design as well as photography, and taught yearbook for 6 years, so I didn't start from scratch. Cricut Design Space isn't the easiest to use, and it is lacking in a lot of features I was used to from Quark, InDesign, Photoshop, and Josten's, but after a few hours of practice, I was able to come up with some things I deemed sufficient. 

I realized how much I missed working with layouts and designs. 

Also, Cricut has a lot of cute designs available, that make it fab for personal use stickers. 

(read their legal page if you aren't making things for personal use). 

New kitten was helping me.

I had some calibration issues with the Print then Cut feature, so I went to Google to find answers.

I came across this quick tutorial on how to fix the issue, and I do have to say, Cricut's calibration feature is super easy! So I'm spending some time today making a bunch of stickers for my planner. 

Hope you are all enjoying your new year, and maybe this post will inspire you to get back into a hobby you've missed doing! 

-NJB