Funny New Year’s Resolutions for Stationery Lovers

Humor is a terrific way to get inspired and be more productive, so we’re here to spread some festive cheer with new year resolutions designed specifically for stationery lovers! We promise that you will abandon and break these resolutions without remorse. And, guess what? We will, too! So, raise a toast for these funny new year resolutions, which will no doubt be toast by this time next year.

Disclaimer – We are not responsible for anyone tempted to break these resolutions. But if you do, send us proof of your mischievous behavior on the Inky Memo Instagram account, and we may just reward you for being a naughty stationery enthusiast. Follow along our list of highly breakable stationery resolutions for a chuckle or two!

Some of history’s most famous characters have had memorable moustaches that defined their personalities. Whether it’s Salvador Dali’s creative moustache, representing his technical mastery and surreal art, or Charlie Chaplin’s ageless toothbrush’stache, which transcends artistry and film. Who can forget Albert Einstein’s untamed hair and unruly mustache, which became symbols of his ‘genius’, or the revolutionary artist Frida Kahlo’s embracing of her facial hair, which celebrated her authenticity and self-expression?

We hope you’re inspired enough to pick up your favorite fountain pens, and old magazines or newspapers and doodle away, re-adorning the faces of your favourite celebrities with your pick of moustache. Extra points for adding a complimentary beard!

Pro tip: Use medium or broad-tipped fountain pen nibs to avoid shredding the newspaper or magazine sheets. Check our YouTube playlist of interesting fountain pens to try out for your experiments.

It binds things together and connects them to one another, keeping them secure and safe. Are we still talking about staple pins, or have we strayed into the dreamy realm of love and relationships?

Staple pins are a true feat of engineering. They’re made of metal which can bend and interlock with itself to fasten sheets of paper or fabric, and that is nothing short of ingenious design! It’s not easy to keep it together under pressure, and yet we can say that the staple pins do a great job at it.

Would you trust these mechanical marvels to decide the fate of your relationships? Why not? Bring it on, staple pins! It’s better than swiping left, right, center and in every other foreseeable direction!

How many of us, as children (or adults!), were left alone with a bottle of White Elmer’s glue or Fevicol and ended up making multiple, soft, mushy, rubbery balls of muck, almost finishing the entire tube? Show your hands, if they are not stuck!

According to historians, adhesives or glue have been around since the Stone Ages. In ancient times, glue was extracted from animal and plant sources, but today we mostly use artificial and synthetic substances such as PVA, EVA, and PH, among others. Have you ever wondered how glue makes things stick to one another? Scientists believe that a variety of processes, including adsorption, chemsorption, mechanical, and diffusion theory, are responsible for the gluey surface adhering to another surface. Consider the electrostatic forces that attract the glue molecules to the molecules on the surface where it must be applied, causing the surfaces to cling together like millions of small magnets.

Think about this the next time you’re making glue balls! Do check our YouTube episode on Fevicol PVA Glue where we used it in a variety of crafting tests, from foam paper craft pieces to paper pop-up cards. We also managed to combine book binding with a DIY stationery organization solution!

We neither confirm nor deny the rumour that one of us has “accidentally” sharpened a whole new pencil down to nothing because we were enjoying the crank of the mechanical sharpener so much.

Because we know how precious pencils are! Not just in light of the several dozen special pencils we have kept safely away from sharpeners in our various pencil pouches, but also because we know there was a time when graphite was as precious as gold. It still is to us.

That is except when we come across an especially satisfying pencil sharpening device. When that happens, all bets are off, and our graphite gluttony knows no end. Sorry. Not sorry.

Pro tip: For the best and finest points stay away from the soft/black (B) side of the pencil grade spectrum. We find anything 2B and harder (including F) can give you a great point to draw or write with. Anything softer will just be a constantly breaking mess. Check out our YouTube playlist of graphite and colour pencil tests.

The main practical use of that entire wardrobe … um drawer, we meant drawer … of unused pristine notebooks and journals you are hoarding is to help you truly understand that bizarre English idiom of wanting to have the cake and eat it too.

We would very much like to have our untouched pristine ‘drawer’ of notebooks but also write in them all too.

You know how it is.

There is a certain romance and sense of possibility to notebooks, if you love stationery. It’s as much what they are as what they could be, if only you could get around to using them. It’s no wonder people have written reams of thoughts and poetic discourse on the wonder of notebooks. But they wrote them on loose scraps of paper, of course.

Pro tip: If you can never get yourself to “soil” a new notebook, we suggest trying out a nice pad of smooth writing paper instead. The sheets being removable makes the first mark a little less painful and before you know it you have finished off all the leaves of the pad in trying to keep it pristine.

Handmade paper is hard to make, or at least you can say making paper is time consuming. So it would make no sense to immediately chop up and mutilate these pristine hand crafted sheets. Except that this would not be the strangest form of confetti.

The known history of confetti at celebratory events goes back to the middle ages in Italy where all sorts of objects were hurled skyward during carnival parades. These included fruit, coins, eggs and mud balls! Oh, and the mud balls were an improvement because they were in reaction to another stationery related style of confetti. In those times, pieces of chalk were also a common object thrown at parades. So dangerous did the ensuing chalk throwing street battles become that chalk was outlawed and replaced by mud balls.

Thankfully, paper confetti came to the rescue in 1875 in Milan. It was repurposed waste from the widespread silk industry there at the time. Lighter, more enjoyable and much safer, paper and lighter materials have become the default confetti we throw at celebrations ever since.

So compared to coins, handmade paper is not so ridiculous to use as confetti. Still, it is a bit of a waste of beautiful paper. If only chopping it up into tiny pieces with our arsenal of great scissors was not so much fun!

We enjoy coming up with our new years resolutions every year. In the spirit of new beginnings and spending on experiences, we like to shop for all new stationery with which to keep to all our stationery resolutions every year too.

But we enjoy “bending” our resolutions a few days later even more.

This is why it keeps getting bigger. That wardrobe of stationery things … um drawer, we meant drawer of stationery things. Just a small drawer. Really.

Have a great year ahead, whenever you read this!