I have been a sticker collecting hobbyist ever since I was in primary school, around kindergarten age. My best friend at the time had just moved to California from Japan & brought a whole crap ton of super cute Sanrio branded goodies to share with me. Not only that, but I got a couple of unique hand-me-down Sanrio items from my sister who got them for free when her father used to have a toy manufacturing contract in the 70s with Sanrio. I fell in love with stationery goods & stickers at a pretty young age, & have been collecting them ever since.

Stickers have been my particular vice out of the entire stationery category. I don’t think I really need to explain why I love stickers so much. They’re cute, & that’s all I will say about that. I have brushed it off in the past, my sticker hoarding obsession, saying that I don’t have a problem with hoarding stickers. However, I think I have to come to terms now with the fact that I actually do have a problem.

I finally gave in & admitted I have a sticker hoarding problem, when I started looking for places to tuck away my piles of sticker sheets. I have a dedicated arts & crafts caboodle-style box for my main collection of stickers, & it’s pretty substantial in size. I mean, it takes up one entire shelf in my closet all by itself. I also have little stashes here & there all around Jian’s home office. I could get a larger storage bins for all of my stickers, but that would just give me an easy excuse to fill it up even more. Most of my sticker hoarding problem stems from my deep rooted sentimentality. I very easily become sentimental & use that, or running out, as excuses to not use certain stickers which end up being more of my collection problem.

Even though I just admitted that I am having a problem with my ever-growing uncontrollable sticker collection, I still made a sticker haul from my last visit to Los Angeles. I somehow had convinced Jian to let me pop in to one of the many Daiso stores around town, thinking to myself, “I am only going to see if there’s anything I could get for my little bean, like a toy or plastic kids’ utensils.” However, I only ended up getting things for myself, & those things were stickers. Let’s explore.

I saw the sticker shelf at Daiso, & I kind of went nuts. Usually, when buying stickers, I am a bit more picky in my selections. Sticker sheets from Japan these days are getting more expensive than ever, but at Daiso where most items are under $10 bucks, I was able to splurge a little more. I was super excited when I saw these styles from San-X. They are a total throwback to my post-high school, early college days when San-X was still an up-&-coming rival brand to the already established Sanrio. Back then, I was working at the Sanrio Surprises store at my local shopping mall, & I was an absolute ‘weeb‘.

Nowadays everybody knows about Rilakkuma (the brown relax bear). From the popular Netflix show & the massive amounts of products (including bootleg), Rilakkuma is probably the most recognizable character. However, the characters I’d been drawn to the most were AfroKen (the Afro-haired shapeshifting dog) & Nyan Nyan Nyanko (the cats who like to disguise themselves as food). Those were the characters I grew up loving & hadn’t seen in many years. Sumikkogurashi & Corocoro Coronya are both relatively new sets of characters, but they are still cute nonetheless. Those were the sticker sheets I chose along with a few miscellany that I often use to punch up the notes I hand write on my wall calendar.

In the last year, I have really conditioned myself to think less about sentimentality when it comes to my arts & crafts supplies. If I run out of a particular style of sticker, then I will just have to accept it. With more reasons this year to use up my crafting supplies, I have actively been trying to use the things I have before I buy more. If I really want to declutter my life & my home, I can’t keep stashing & storing arts & crafts supplies with the intention of using it sometime in the whatever future. I have to use these items & not let them go to waste. So off I go, to make another celebration card, & until the next time…cheers!

Today’s song of the day: