Mommy Monday: DIY planner stickers

So.... it's September. Anyone else feeling the pressure?!? Wow, as an elementary teacher for almost a decade you would think I would have had a clue what it was like to be a parent of preschool children. I didn't. Now I know. Guys, back-to-school season as a teacher is tough, but it's 10 million times harder as a teacher and parent combination. Whew!

All of that to say, I appreciate my planner now more than ever (yeah, I didn't think that was possible either!). I refer to it multiple times every day in order to have any clue what I am supposed to be doing for the next few hours. If you haven't yet, you can check out my "planner share" post, where I showed you the good, bad, and ugly of my August and September monthly planning pages, where I first started experimenting with decorating and adding some other elements besides colorful pens to my planner. My favorite new planner accessory is my DIY stickers, so today I'm sharing with you how I made them- I promise it's super-easy and definitely cheap!

The supplies you'll need are some markers (I used some sharpies, since my wonderful friend Megumi gave me a set- she sure knows how to make me happy!- but you can use any kind with a reasonably large tip), a dark pen, some scissors, and some of these white Avery labels. You could make this project even one step easier by using these colored ones. (I bought my white ones at Walmart and they were a few dollars cheaper than those online links.)

I started off by coloring one sticker in each color. Because first of all it makes me happy to see a rainbow of stickers like that, and secondly I wanted to see what each color looked like on a sticker and choose a designated color for each category of sticker I wanted to use regularly.

I chose a few of my favorite colors and made a "sample sticker" of each category that I wanted to use. I keep these samples with my planner supplies so that when I want to make a sticker I can quickly see which color I was using before for that item.

Since I keep my entire life in one planner, everything has to be as space-efficient as possible (without making me go cross-eyed). For things that just needed an icon, I put two on each sticker and cut it in half. I tried using half of a label (cutting long-ways) for the ones with writing (mostly school events), but it was too hard to read. Here's what they look like on my monthly spreads:

Aren't they cute? I'm not totally in love with the larger stickers yet, but I'm working on some ideas to tweak them a little.... maybe I will be totally in love by October :)

Do you use stickers in your planner? Do you buy them or make them yourself? There are tons of cute planner stickers on Etsy but I just can't justify that kind of spending, nor do I want my planner to get too close to an art project and lose it's practicality ;)

Best of luck to us all as we fly through the rest of September!