Atlas Stationers & Escaping the Parade

Everybody loves a parade…except me. So when Forest Park held their annual St. Patrick’s Day parade earlier this month, Naoto decided to take me into Chicago to Atlas Stationers and Spinning J’s for a day date! (And for the record, admitting my parade disdain online means I could never run for office in this town!)

Atlas has been around forever–over 80 years! Every time I’d pass by on the L, I would wonder about it. They used to be more of an office supply store, but since 2019, they turned their attention to fountain pens, inks, stationery, and other fine analog tools.

They offer soooo many inks and fountain pen styles and have a huge testing station where you can try different nib sizes and pens. I am planning to go back to add to my tiny fountain pen collection.

Atlas offers thirty-three brands of inks, and over 700 color choices! As someone who cannot make a decision to save her life and will almost always buy another shade of blue, this sounded overwhelming but they make it so easy! All of their inks are shown in this sample book (both swatched and written so you can see how the ink looks coming from a fountain pen) which

On this visit though, I was there for a springy pink ink, particularly the Ferris Wheel Press Fluttering Heart. I was tempted into buying other things too…

I am particularly excited about the bird letterpress notecards. And I couldn’t resist Atlas Iron Ore which was made with Atlas and Chicago in mind. It’s a perfect grey/black with some sparkle.

The best part of the visit was meeting Therese/Mrs. Atlas. She was so warm and welcoming and shared how much she loves packing orders. She gave me a couple of the postcards they send when they ship orders and some giant Atlas Stationers stickers which I will be sharing with my pen pals. (They are the same as the bottom postcard of Atlas lit up at night.)

I am looking forward to another visit soon. They have an annual sidewalk sale in August!

Definitely worth missing the parade for some stationery!

A New Hobonichi Cover

For my birthday earlier this year, Naoto gave me a new leather cover for my Hobonichi. It’s a deep, dark blue with a natural interior and a brass zipper. When I say this is the nicest thing I own, I am not lying.

He got it from Baum Kuchen, one of my favorite shops for just quality, gorgeous “artifacts,” which is what they call the items in their collection. The planner cover is made by Superior Labor, a Japanese lifestyle brand. I have a couple of other things made by them that I got at the Travelers Notebook store in Japan, and their handmade attention to detail just cannot be topped. They are true artisans.

In the front pocket, I keep a little variety of pictures and cards that I just like to have around—good memories, quotes to remember, a letterpress postcard of a typewriter.

This is the first cover that I’ve had for a Hobonichi where you don’t tuck the front page of the planner into the cover. I kind of like that there’s more of the Hobonichi exposed and more surface area for my sticker collection! I’ve been adding some of my favorite stickers to the front that just feel very 2022 to me.

Here are the other stickers that I started the year with when I was using my plain Hobonichi cover. I’ve always been someone who gets anxious about using stickers, but for some reason, sticking them in my planner is so easy for me! (If you are curious about any of the stickers, let me know and I’ll share a source if I have one!)

I’m still decorating my monthly and weekly pages with stickers and washi tape. Every Sunday, I work on my upcoming weekly pages and towards the end of the month, I work on the upcoming month. It’s just a nice, relaxing, (somewhat) mindless activity. Since the pandemic, I’ve found myself really needing to make sure I have downtime/alone time carved out in my schedule. (I guess you could say that my re-introduction back to regular life has been slow!) Spending some time each week with my calendar and looking ahead to commitments helps me to schedule for my introvert needs.

Yet again I have failed to use all of the pages Hobonichi offers to me, but I do keep track of the books I’ve read in the blank pages at the back of the planner. (I’m so behind on my reading this year! I was doing so well in the beginning and then I fell off the wagon!) Someday, I’ll document all of the TV I watch during the year—just to see exactly how many times I watch The Office if nothing else!

In the back pocket, I keep this hilarious vintage Instagram of me and Pres, along with my Historical Society of Forest Park business cards, some little inspirational cards, a pen, some stickers, and some postage stamps.

I am so thankful that Naoto pays attention to what’s important to me! I love that something I use every day is encased in such a special cover. It just feels like a treat to use my calendar every day!

Bread Mail

I ate a lot of sandwiches in Japan during our last visit. Sandwiches in Japan are among my favorite things. (This should be a #JDIB post…I need to look through my pictures.) To commemorate the many sandwiches, I bought this “sando” letter set while we were in Okinawa.

Last week on Instagram, Assembly of Text did a little challenge for writing a letter about your relationship with bread. My pen pal, Nic, and I had a little online chat about the challenge but I decided to write her a bread love letter, too. Then I remembered that I have a little collection of bread stickers to share. I bought these at Loft a couple years ago and found them tucked away in my Japan hoard drawer. They have a really nice texture and really pretty, soft illustrations of Japanese bakery items, including strawberry bread, which I regret to say I’ve never tried.Aren’t they so cute and carby? I had these little cats with cakes envelopes so I figured they are on-theme enough. The silver foil fork and the tiny paw reaching for the cake slay me. The sandwich letter set isn’t made for a verbose letter, but it was enough room to tell Nic all about my love of sandwiches in Japan. Also found in my Japanese hoard drawer…these washi bread stickers! They’re made of washi, so they have a really pretty transparency. It’s hard to tell from my pictures, but the colors are almost neon, which makes the browns of the bread much more fun. I used these to decorate the envelope.Then I remembered this Japanese pancake washi tape I bought in Tokyo that would fit in with the carb theme. I stuck a little piece on the envelope flap and wrote #carbmail on the envelope, though I really like #breadmail better.

This was a fun little morning activity that made me look through my stash to see what could fit. It also reminded me (yet again) that not every letter needs to be long and in detail about my day or about staying home or pandemic fears. As a matter of fact, it was a nice break NOT to talk about the weirdness of now.

 

 

Write On Check-In

How is everyone’s letter writing coming along? As of today, I’m ahead of the curve and hoping to finish strong. The last week is always the hardest because I’m either behind or desperately losing steam. (But it’s not like I don’t have extra time right now!) I’ve been having a lot of fun with rubber stamps and vintage postage this month. I love a good stamp collage, themed or not.

In a huge mail fail, I was in a rush to get a birthday card out to my coworker on Saturday morning and I forgot to put a stamp on it. Oops. I couldn’t resist ordering some pandemic cards from Dear Hancock earlier this month, even though I’m still making my way through my greeting card collection. Does anyone have enough self-control to not buy more cards and stamps even though you have plenty at home?

Pen Pal Stationery Tour Part 3: The Wares

I think this is all I bought during the Pen Pal Stationery Tour…

Above is what I bought at Yamada. The library stuff is my favorite and I restocked my stash from our last trip. I couldn’t resist the avocado handkerchief for Naoto. And those green things are stickers modeled after a famous notebook company, Japonica, that every school kid knows. And I just realized that the little bird and mountain notepad snuck in here, but I bought it at Tonarino. (It’s too dark to re-take the pictures now!) At Tonarino, besides the notepad, I stuck with mostly their in-house designs. And the sumo eating the hot pot (chanko) is the only thing I bought at Sublo 36. (I told you I had regrets.) And finally, some fun new and vintage papers from Hachimakura. I’m excited to use some of these in my Traveler’s Notebook. From the top left: the red shrine is an old tobacco box from the Showa Era (1926-1989) that I want to display. The Moon Pencils label is a pencil box label. The geisha girls are matchbox labels from the 1920s. Below that, is old play money. (Isn’t it so fun and colorful?) The sheer pink and white things are nouget candy wrappers, also from the Showa Era. I liked the onsen symbol on them. And the circle labels are liquor shop labels from before World War II.

(Thanks to Naoto for translating all of that for me for this post. He and Geof stayed outside while April and I shopped so we were on our own to make our purchases!)

 

Pen Pal Stationery Tour Part Two

Our next stop (after lunch) in the Pen Pal Stationery Tour was Sublo 36. It’s a tiny shop and it was verrry crowded. And like, Yamada, there are so many products in little cubbies and drawers, it was kind of a challenge to shop when you’re basically on top of the next person. I’d love to go back on a quieter day because I’m having regrets about not buying some things! I didn’t get many pictures inside Sublo (which is up these quirky stairs by the way) because it was too crowded for my photographer and I was too busy shopping and trying to stay out of other shoppers’ ways. They have a lot of original products (you can see them here) that I totally didn’t take advantage of buying when I was there. After this, Naoto had discovered that we were a short walk away from Karel Capek tea shop so we took a stationery break. I’ll write about Karel Capek in another post–it’s the cutest. On the way to the train for our next stop, we bought some gyoza from a very busy gyoza shop in the neighborhood. Delicious! (Oh and that’s April’s partner Geof. He and Naoto were the best sports about stationery shopping all day!)At the end of the tour was Hachimakura, which we’ve visited before. April and I delighted in the vintage papers in this tiny shop. We finished the tour with dinner at a little izakaya near Hachimakura. We ate cabbage with yuzu dressing, bacon with grain mustard, tomago, fried mozzarella dipped in honey (It was soooo good I need to try this in America,) wasabi chicken, cucumber dipped in miso, and we drank beers and yuzu drinks. It was the perfect meal to end a really fun day. Until next time, April & Geof!

Pen Pal Stationery Tour Part One

A crazy fun fact about our trip to Japan: it coincided with my pen pal April’s trip to Japan! We didn’t have a ton of time together, but we did spend an entire day doing a Pen Pal Stationery Tour along the Chuo Line out to the outskirts of Tokyo. Naoto and I did some of these shops last time, but I wanted to revisit them, particularly Hachimakura and Yamada Stationery, and to visit a new shop or two. Yamada is one of my favorite shops in all of Japan. They have stationery lines that are unique and harder to find in Tokyo. Their merchandising is so good. As you can see, there are so many nooks and crannies to explore and find more papery goodness! Some of my favorite things are on the rack above. They have a whole library line with washi tape, stickers, library cards and pockets, buttons…it’s all so good! Next stop was Torino where they don’t allow photography inside. (Don’t tell on us because apparently we took a few last time we visited…oops!) Fun fact: Naoto left his phone on the ledge outside of Torino and we didn’t realize until we’d traveled all the way to the next station. We thought it was gone forever, but nope…it was still there. No one touched it! It was very stressful in the moment, but afterwards, it gave us all a laugh, and of course reminded us that Japan Does It Better! 

I’ll be back on Monday with part two of our day together! Hopefully it will be sunny enough this weekend for me to take a few pictures of my purchases. 

mt labo

It took two tries (thanks to new year closings) but we made it to the mt lab (mt labo) towards the end of our trip. The shop is so spare and clean…it was seriously a dream place to shop. All of the washi tapes were organized by color. (You know how I love to ROY G BIV things!) The regular tapes were in clear cylinders all along the left side of the shop. It was so hard not to buy every single one. There was a whole table of limited edition tapes that can only be bought at this store. They had these new clear sheet stickers that can be used to add a pop of color to clear trays, phone cases, or whatever you want. I didn’t buy any of them, but they were neat! They also had these fun, one-of-a-kind collage bags made of mt banners from different special mt events throughout Japan. Isn’t that such a cool way to reuse something that would normally end up in the trash?One of the other cool features of the store was the tape cutter that cuts rolls of washi tape into different thicknesses. They were nice enough to do a demo for us. First they rolled the tape onto the cardboard tube.

After that they cut the tape into thin, medium, and thick rolls. It was neat to see the pattern of the master tape change based on the width of the tape.

They sold all of the different widths at the counter. This is the face of someone who was shopping in her merchandised zen.I think I was pretty restrained in my purchases!

Nengajō Day

When we decided to go to Japan over the new year, I was so excited to send nengajo! On January 2nd, Naoto took me to the post office at Tokyo Station so I could write my postcards and send them with new year stamps. I bought these cards at Loft on New Year’s Day. It’s the year of the rat, so I ran with the mouse theme. The Japan Post issued these cute stamps for 2020. There’s some kind of lottery involved with them, but since I sent them overseas, I’m not sure what a winner would do if their number was drawn. I wrote all of my postcards in the letter room at the Kitte mall while Naoto entertained himself at the station master’s desk. Something new since the last time we visited is this &Post mobile letter writing truck. We didn’t get to see the truck in action but I’m following it on Instagram to see what happens. They also had this book, Letters by Noriko Kudo. I love the colored pencil drawings and the collaged pages with handwritten letters. (I’ve been on the hunt for a copy of my own since we got home…I want to add it to my library of mail books. I wrote the last of my nengajo on the Narita Express on the way to the airport. I also stocked up on some postcards for next new year because there were so many good ones! (Of course those don’t have mice or the year 2020 on them!)

P.S. There is a special mailbox for the nengajo.

Traveler’s Factory at Narita Airport

I’m always so happy when we fly out of Terminal 1 at Narita Airport so I can shop one last time before we get on the plane! We didn’t get any good pictures of the Tokyo Station Traveler’s Shop, but I thought I’d share the airport pictures while we’re on a TN kick. They had a huge selection of baggage stickers at the airport. Seriously, how did I not buy it all? This is what I did end up getting…which is plenty. I love the little Narita facts postcard. And…I can’t believe I’d resisted the reading bookmarks for as long as I did!

I always say I’m going to share my Traveler’s Notebook here, but I never do because it’s kind of just a bit of a scrapbook and a journal and there are way better examples on Instagram. But maybe someday I’ll share anyway…