this n that n pouch issue 2!

plus: printer workshop recap and more!! 🖨️

Hello again my friends!!

It’s been another super busy month for me, and my super busy months are the most challenging for me to write about! I want to tell you EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING, and the way I handle this in person is by talking really fast rather than using fewer words lol. That hack doesn’t work so well for writing though, unfortunately!!

but then I just realized 10 minutes ago,

“Wait a minute, what if I just wrote a little bit about everything? That seems way easier!”

So here is today’s newsletter, featuring a little bit of everything! We’re talking printer workshop, stickers that blink, stickers that don’t blink, fast software development, slow software development, and… wait for it… Pouch Issue #2!!

Hope you’re enjoying the first week of fall! 🍁

♡ vrk

🖨️ Stationery Fest Printer workshop

Me and my wonderful workshop attendees!! Btw, the women in matching outfits are best friends and they coordinated all their outfits for Stationery Fest 😭❤️

I taught 2 sessions of a workshop on “How to Print Photos And Stickers” at Stationery Fest last month! This was a workshop that covered 1) printing high-quality photos from an inkjet printer, 2) cutting stickers with a cutting machine, 3) using mini printers. It was my first time ever teaching this course, and there were SO many moving pieces, I was really nervous about how it would all turn out!!

So, how did it go?? Well, by objective measures, the workshop went very well 😂 Photos were printed, stickers were made by all, and people had a good time!! I sent an anonymous feedback survey to attendees and it was very highly-rated too.

I made a little Instagram Reel on what I did to prep for the workshop if you want the visual!!

So it went well, and honestly it went extremely well given how difficult this was to pull off. It’s not like we were in a computer lab, and I didn’t even have a projector, so just to make this workshop happen at all, it was… kind of a logistical nightmare lol. I ended up preparing 6 laptops that attendees could use (a combination of my own laptops + some borrowed from friends), and on all of them I created guest logins, installed drivers and software, downloaded required files and manually configured all needed presets; I brought my 2 inkjet printers and 5 mini printers connected to 2 guest phones that I also reformatted and prepared with guest logins; I wrote a 40-page workbook on inkjet printing and sticker cutting, with step-by-step screenshots, that took over 12 hours just to print copies for 24 attendees; I made a companion 12-page zine on mini printers; I made printouts for the wifi settings and the necessary presets for those bringing their own laptops; I prepared sample packs of high-quality printer paper for everyone… it was a LOT of work!! And I’m proud that I was able to do it!!

BUT! I’m an experienced teacher and I used to teach workshops regularly, and I knowwww what my best workshops look and feel like, aaaand this was not that 😅 pretty far from it! Instead my workshop was (quite) a bit more hectic and chaotic than it needed to be.

I know the crux of what went wrong; I made 2 big rookie mistakes:

1. I put WAYYYYYY too much content in a 90 minute workshop. I WAS TOO EXCITED ABOUT PRINTERS 😭 and tried to cover way too much. This workshop needed to be split into 2, if not 3 workshops 😂 or it needed to be like 3+ hours long for real!!

2. I made the sticker example way too hard 😔 Gahhhhhh I know better than to do this!! But this was a result of point (1). As I was preparing for the workshop, I knew that this was too much for 90 minutes, but I was in a bind because I had already sold tickets for the event, saying I’d cover all of these topics, so I had to cover everything somehow anyway! I needed to pick and choose precisely what I would include, and for stickers in particular, I had to make a choice: A) Do I cover a very simple sticker example, which isn’t what folks usually want to make; or B) do I cover a more complex example, that’s more inline with what folks typically want to make, but is a lot more steps? (Ideally we’d start with something simple and gradually increase difficulty, but… no time for that.) I went with option B, and gahhh it was just way too hard as a first example. My biggest regret is that because of this, too many people left the workshop feeling like, “Gosh, sticker making is really difficult!” which is the absolute opposite thing I wanted to convey!! And totally preventable had I just chosen an easier example. Sigh.

I worked soooo hard on this workshop, and I really wish it had been a “11/10, wow home run, no edits, etc” experience, but instead it was a “this is so chaotic but hey we’re on the rails!! sort of!! barely!!” experience, and so honestly, that was a bummer!! And I’m still a little sad about it 🥲

However, I also know that’s usually how the first-ever offering goes ❤️‍🩹 I’m lucky that the students were soooo wonderful and supportive and understanding and they enjoyed their time anyway — and everyone left with PHOTOS and STICKERS. And I also learned a ton too and I have a lot of ideas on what I would do differently next time. We’ll call that a win!!!!

Also, I continue to be floored by how much interest there is in home printing!! SO MANY WOMEN came up to my Pouch booth to ask me printer questions, as they saw I was teaching a printer workshop but it sold out before they could register. I’ve been starting to get emails from random people on the internet asking me for printer advice, including a LinkedIn message lol, and in the last month I’ve casually consulted 3 different friends on printers (like THEY asked ME, I didn’t force it on them 😂).

Printers are so in!!! I think now more than ever, people wanna make things that are real ✂️

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💀 ok I’ve already lied to you

Remember how I started this newsletter saying that I would say a LITTLE BIT about everything?? And I just wrote a LOT about my printer workshop??

We’re gonna speed things up now!!

(or am I lying again!?!? let’s find out!!)

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2️⃣ Pouch Issue #2 is underway!

Available to preorder as part of a 2025 subscription (2 issues)!!

I’ve started work on Pouch Issue #2! 🥳 I’ve doing tons of planning and prepping the last few weeks and I’ve drafted my first article as well 🤫

I’m SO excited for this second issue! Pouch Issue #1 got really good reception from the stationery-obsessed crowd, so I’m not planning to make drastic changes; I mostly want to improve on what’s there. I want to make the content even more fun and engaging, I want my designs to be cuter and prettier (at least as much my design skills allow me to do!!), and I want to show off even more wonderful contributions from the stationery community!

Also, big news: This time around I’m getting help from my friend and collaborator-in-stationery, the incomparable Nikki Chan!! She’s been meeting with me and helping with things like, giving feedback on what articles to include, outreach to stationery folks, and she might write an article or two too…! It’s been soOOoOOo enormously helpful to have a thought partner on Pouch, especially someone who is just as deep in the stationery world as I am 😂 and it’s a lifesaver to have someone to help me quickly decide on the million micro-decisions involved in making a magazine. Love you Nikki, and thank you!!! 🫶

Pouch Issue 2 is currently available for preorder as part of a 2025 2-issue subscription! In other words, you can preorder Pouch Issue 2 and 3 together¹ now for 10% off the cover price, or you can wait to get Pouch Issue 2 when it’s ready — coming Spring 2025!

More to come on ALL of this in the upcoming weeks!! 🎈

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🔋 New project: Chibitronics

At the tail end of August, I started a part-time gig as a software engineer for Chibitronics! We got a grant from the Department of Education to develop a gadget that connects the Chibitronics sticker system to the micro:bit (in other words: work to help kids learn STEM stuff), and I’m the lead software engineer on the grant.

Basically I’m working on the way for kids to write code to make their sticker lights go blinky ✨ Kids can use Scratch-like visual coding blocks to write rules like, “When you press the A button, show this pattern on my light,” and then they hook it up to the micro:bit which follows their commands IRL.

Here’s a demo video of a little piece I wired up:

It’s been super fun!! It also hasn’t been too much work on my end — much of the work is regarding the physical component that the rest of the engineers on the team are handling, as well as the educational materials for teachers using the system — so so far it’s been a good freelance project that still gives me time for my other endeavors. Hoping it continues that way!! 🤞

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📖 New project: Journal Helper

lol click through to see the concept art animation!!

I started a new personal software project too!! I’m calling it Journal Helper. It’s a simple tool that makes it easy for folks to print out photos for journals like the Hobonichi Techo.

In the last 14 months, I’ve written about ~5 other small independent pieces of software, all of which I made, start-to-finish, in a mad dash over a few days or a few weeks. I could try the same approach here, but I’m juggling so many things at the moment that a mad dash is kinda hard for me to pull off right now. (It’s sorta like actual running. It’s hard to go super fast if you gotta stop at a traffic light every few blocks!) Plus, I never actually wanted to work on those code bases again… the software you write in a mad dash is not often fun to work on later!!

I decided that instead, for Journal Helper, I’m gonna take it slow and steady! I have drafted up some rough mocks, wrote a small product doc (well, a list of bullet points), and before coding, I’m doing some good old-fashioned learning first!

(Technical details for the software engineers reading: I’ve been going through The Joy of React! I’m a web expert and I’ve used React for years, but I had some gaps in my React knowledge, plus I wasn’t caught up on the massive Next.js update, plus I had been meaning to check out Josh’s course anyway, soooo this felt like the perfect excuse! Verdict: Omggg the course is a MASTERPIECE!! I might write a longer blog post on this off-newsletter, but my god this is an amazing course if you’re an expert-programmer-but-not-an-expert-at-React! (And seems great for folks outside of that demographic too! Though not good nor intended for complete beginner coders.) Josh explains *why* specific React APIs are designed the way they are designed, and how they work underneath the covers, and how all these pieces are supposed to work together *nicely*… in addition to practically, how do you build with the basics. It goes very deep yet is extremely easy to read and is very bingeable! (Have I ever said that about a technical course…?) I completed modules 1-4 in a few days, including exercises, and I’m now working my way through module 6. (Skipped 5 for now, will revisit after I’ve broken-ground on coding Journal Helper.) Loving this course, highly recommend!!! /End technical details)

Not gonna lie, the “slow and steady” approach to software development is VERY uncomfortable for me!! I’m such an impatient person lollll, and after 4+ years of working at early-stage tech startups, going lightning-slow feels so very wrong. But it’s the only way I can realistically work on this and everything else I’m doing, so I’m trying to unlearn my startup brainwashing 😆, relax, and enjoy the process 🐢

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✏️ Learning to draw comic people

I’m taking “Formula Drawing and Analysis for Cartoonists I” at SVA!

One last new thing I started this month: I am taking an online course at SVA called Formula Drawing and Analysis for Cartoonists I!!

I was initially going to take a design-focused course this quarter, but it ended up getting canceled 🥲 so I quickly registered for my “backup” course, this one! Sometimes I surprise myself with my own reactions though — even though this was my “backup,” I think I’m way more excited about this class than the one I was originally registered for 😭 Sure, a design-focused course would help me in all aspects of what I’m trying to do professionally (and it’d be really fun, and I still really want to take it!!!), but this cartoonist class might help me draw Kermit and Mario better?? Clearly that’s the higher priority for me!!

Speaking of priorities, I also need to really increase my shoulder mobility and strength exercises loll. I’m already a super-slouchy programmer in my 30s who spends way too much time sitting immobile at my desk, and now I’ve added a drawing habit?! My shoulders are VERY MAD AT ME. I gotta start moving more throughout the day!! Practical advice on this also very welcome!! (Sadly I already lift weights, like heavy weights, 5 days a week, but ~30 minutes of movement isn’t enough to counteract 10+ straight hours of slug life it turns out)

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🌸 Stickers I bought recently that you should buy too

just a boy and his space friends!

I reorganized my entire sticker collection and subsequently, obviously, I bought a bunch more stickers!

I’ll leave you all with some recommendations:

• 🪐 Just a Boy and His Space Friends by w0nkk0: I got the EarthBound Hobonichi HON for 2025, so I neeeeeeeded these stickers! My order hasn’t even arrived yet and I am contemplating ordering another sheet lol. w0nkk0’s art style is just so good!!! I also got this and like 10 other sheets.

• 🐈‍⬛ Animal crossing emotion reaction sticker sheet by Reytorra: I met Reytorra at Stationery Fest and she is such a blast!! Her work is so cute and clever, and I love her little creative touches, like making this emotion sticker sheet in the shape of a dialog bubble lol. She’s relaunching her store soon and I can’t wait to see what’s coming!!

• 🛋️ Idle Relaxation sheet by Mindwave: Loveeee these poses!! I didn’t get them but the Today Is Another Day Stickers also have a lot of gems too. (Pet peeve of mine though: I wish sticker companies produced stickers like these in a variety of skin tones instead of just one 😑😑😑 and as I improve my own drawing skills I’d love to try my hand (I guess literally!!) at this!)

• 👻 Gitchiri Obake Ghost sticker sheet also by Mindwave: I think you need some tiny ghosts for October (or maybe some tiny tiny ones)

Dang I had a few more sticker recommendations, buuut they’re all sold out now and I’m not gonna do that to you 😆 So!! Bonus: a sticker printer kickstarter is launching today, here’s a very good stamp and — ok this is sold out too but look at this dogggggggg

Thanks as always for reading, dear friends, and enjoy the rest of your day!! 💖

1. I’m doing preorders as an Issue 2 & 3 bundle and not allowing folks preorder issue 2 or 3 due to verrrrrrrrry annoying limitations on the ecommerce platform I’m using (Payhip) 😭 sighhhh I think I need to migrate off Payhip! I already migrated from Gumroad to Payhip earlier this year, so a second store migration in one year is theeee last thing I want to do 😭😭😭 For now I shall continue to kick this can down the road!!!