Two Birds, One Stone

I bought a date stamper. I hate the fonts they use on those things, but dating my journal with stickers created major lumps in my Tomoe River paper and it's been difficult to write in because of that.

My handwriting? Not great, so I thought just buy a date stamper. It's easier to live with ugly than to deal with lumps.

And then I had a scathingly brilliant idea.

I have an undated five-year diary. It came with year stamps, but it fits on an acrylic block and it's ink, stamp, ink, stamp, ink, stamp. For maximum stamping precision, I should be using an acrylic pencil board under it, but can you imagine ink, stamp, move the board, ink, stamp, move the board?

Argh! I'd lose my mind.

Then I thought, I have a date stamper. What if I could set the month and day to nothing and just stamp the year? This is one of those self-inking stampers, so it's just stamp, stamp, stamp.

The bad news? There's no way to lose the month and while I can turn the first part of the date to be flat (for example it's Oct 6, 2026 on the stamper, not Oct 06, 2026), I couldn't do that with the second number. I could, however, turn it to a slash.

Oct / 2026

I thought about it for a moment and then decided to do it. It went so much faster and looks so much cleaner than the clear stamps I was using. Sure, I have the month along with the year, but because this stamp is smaller, it's not a problem and the top of the page has the month anyway.

This ugly font date stamp has solved two issues!