More Stickers

I got all worked up yesterday about being able to do things that I couldn't do before, and I forgot to mention that I further added to my crazy collection of window stickers. I got a Frio River sticker and put it just above the big sticker for The Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park sticker. 

Sadly, I effed it up. It was a sticker with just the words "Frio River" on it. So, basically it was nine separate letter stickers. They were held in place by a clear film that you put on your window, then peel away, and the stickers stay in their proper place.

When I went to put the stickers on, though, I misjudged the shape of my window. I didn't account for the curve in the corner, and the F in Frio went up onto the rubber edge. When I tried to back out of it and pull the stickers back off, it didn't work. The film came away, but the letter stickers remained. There was no way to get it off without totally effing it up.

It's not terrible, so I guess I'm going to leave it, but I did get a razor blade when I got home and cut the corner that was folded up off. Having that curled up onto the rubber looked bad. I had to at least remove that. So, now it looks like this:

It's alright, but it won't take much to convince me to remove it and get something else to put in its place, that's for sure.

So Much More Of Those People

I said in the end of my last post about this that it would certainly be something that got out of hand quickly. I, who had aspirations of filling my back windows with stickers of the places I'd visited in my life, was able now to make my own stickers at any time. What would I do? Well, go overboard of course.

The first thing I did was take scans of the stickers that Temu sent me in grossly over-exaggerated proportions. Then I asked my daughter to make versions of those in a normal size. So, I now have a normal-sized version of my Grand Canyon sticker along with my St. Augustine, Florida sticker.

That St. Augustine one, I think, is my favorite. I loved that freaking lighthouse, so I couldn't resist getting the sticker. I was so sad when it was way too bug, but now I get to use it after all.

My daughter also made me the Mesa Verde sticker that came too big. The normal-size one looks good.

But that certainly wasn't where I stopped. I could make my own freaking stickers if I wanted to! So, of course, I was going to do that. There was a spot on my window that was likely to remain empty unless I made a sticker that fit it perfectly. It had to be tall and skinny, which seemed like the right place for a tree-shaped sticker. I just did that with the Muir Woods sticker from my last post though, so I tried to come up with something else. I figured, a lighthouse would work. 

I love lighthouses. When I was in my early-twenties, my family took a trip to the Outer Banks in North Carolina, and they had a lot of lighthouses there. We went to a few of them, including the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, and the lighthouse on Ocracoke Island. 

I asked the AI that I usually use to design my book covers with to make me a picture of the two lighthouses, and was surprised to find that the Ocracoke one looked pretty close to correct. So, I cropped it, and created this sticker.

I measured the spot on the window to make sure the sticker would fit, and my daughter printed it out for me. Now, that empty spot is filled in nicely.

While I was at it, I couldn't find a good sticker for the Bahamas, which I had visited on a cruise once back in the nineties on that same trip where we went to the Outer Banks, but also just this year in February. I'd ordered a sticker from Temu that I didn't really like that much, but now, I could make something much better.

I again had the AI make me a picture, this time of a white sand beach with palm trees. I sifted through the various options, and settled on this picture that I designed into a sticker.

We printed it out. We didn't even have to worry about making it fit in any little nook, so it could be a normal shape and size if we wanted. I like how it turned out.

There was one more place I thought I ought to put on my window. I had a sticker for Cancún, San Diego, San Francisco, Park City, and New York City—all cities that I've seen in the last ten to fifteen years or so. One big destination that I didn't have, though, was New Orleans. We visited that city for the first time not long after coming to Houston, and have been back a few times since. I love that place, despite the fact that I lost (or was pickpocketed) $100 out of my shorts pocket and also dropped my off-brand GoPro camera into the swamp while I was there.

I had looked for good NOLA stickers on Temu, and come up empty-handed. But I could make my own now, folks! I found a sticker that had a good bit of art, but had a crappy design. I cropped the crappy design elements out, and redesigned it for myself, coming up with this look:

If you're wondering, yes, that's the same font I use for Rish Outfield's name on all of his book covers. It's a good looking font. We printed out the sticker, and now, it's on my back window.

So, I added another six stickers to my window. This can't go on for much longer. This is what it looks like now.

Not a whole lot of space left. I can probably fill up both of the side windows, but the middle one needs to remain sticker-free. That's where the rear-view mirror looks. As much as I love covering my window with stickers, I need to be able to see what's going on behind me more.

There are still some places I'd like to do stickers of, though. One place I loved as a kid was in far Northern California called Lava Beds National Monument. It was a network of caves carved in prehistoric days by lava flow. It was so fun exploring our way through those caves. I'd like to do a sticker for that place. I'd have to make my own, though, because I can't find any place online that has one for sale. Maybe the AI can make me a cave that looks good enough. We'll see.

More Of Those People

When my daughter got her Cricut machine a few years ago, she had a pretty distinct purpose to fulfill with it, but as time went by, she learned more and more about the other things she could do with it as well. There are so many things you can do with vinyl. I wouldn't be surprised if sometime soon we could start cutting our own records using the thing and become a world famous band...oh, wait, people don't do bands anymore. It's just idiots with no talent singing like they're the winner of the voice and then processing the hell out of their music until it sounds nothing like themselves to make it listenable. Maybe not.

Anyway, one of the things my daughter discovered is that you can make window stickers using her machine. She wanted to try it out, so she asked me if there was something I'd want to put on my window. Maybe a Minnesota Vikings sticker? 

I guess I could try that, so I sent her a logo and she made me a sticker. It looked amazing, exactly like a sticker I'd pay handsomely at a sports store to be able to own. I stuck it on my truck and started driving around with it. My daughter made a few more stickers for my wife and for my other daughter, ones that she'd even designed herself. Soon, we all had a sticker on our cars that she'd created.

Unfortunately, the stickers didn't handle the weather very well. They were printed off a computer, and the color began fading out pretty quickly. It only took a few weeks for my Vikings logo to become a plain white sticker in the outline of a Vikings logo. That happened to all the other stickers she'd created as well. We had to peel them off and call the experiment a failure.

Fast forward to very recently, when I decided to turn my truck into one of those trucks that is covered with window stickers. I talked about how I'd become one of those people in a blog post a week ago if you want to know the whole story there. After taking that leap, but being thwarted by the proliferation of oddly oversized window stickers on Temu, I started thinking of other inexpensive ways to go about it.

I noticed that somebody I work with has a sticker for Yosemite National Park on their Jeep that was just a one color thing. It was a white sticker, and the rest was negative space, that became the black of the tinted window. It looked pretty good, and I wondered if my daughter could do something like that. After all, she'd already made me several national park shirts using designs we'd found on the internet that were just like this—one color designs using the color of the shirt as the accent color. She could probably use one of those pre-made designs and print a sticker out.

She sure could, and in no time, I had a new sticker.

It might have been better had it been in a light green, but we didn't have that color of vinyl. This sticker cost us absolutely nothing to make, so it was an upgrade from the ones that I'd paid for last time and then discovered they were just way too big.

Asking my daughter to do this for me, however, got her mind going. Ever since the original failure of the Vikings sticker, she'd been brooding ever so slightly. She didn't like to lose. There had to be a way to make it work. She'd heard that if you laminated the stickers, then the colors wouldn't run off, and when I asked her to make a window sticker for me, she was motivated to give it a try. She ordered some laminate sheets from Amazon...which negated the whole we-didn't-pay-anything-for-the-Everglades-sticker thing. It led us to blow money elsewhere, so we paid in the end.

My daughter told me she going to try the laminate stickers now, and this got me thinking about what kind of sticker I could have her make for me. I sat down and messed around with stuff I could find on the internet, combining things until I came up with this design for a Muir Woods sticker, a place that I've visited several times over the years, but most recently back in 2018. 

I was still in the one-color vinyl line of thinking though. I wanted to make something that we could print out that way if we had to. My daughter had moved on. She wasn't going to make a simple one color design. She asked me if I liked this new version of my design she'd done for me with a gradient that made the trees more tree like.

I had to admit that it looked pretty darn good. She printed the sticker, did the lamination thing, and that night, I had a new window sticker waiting for me on my keyboard. I put it on my truck the next morning, and here's how it turned out:

I have to say, as a creative person, that there's nothing better than seeing your own ideas go from an inspiration to a physical manifestation like they can in this modern day and age. That goes for stickers like this to my stories and novels too. It's just so amazing what we can do now.

Of course, you can expect me to go overboard, and have my whole window filled with stickers in no time. If I can make my own, then of course I will. I think I'll start by having her make some of those stickers that I got from Temu in sizes that are way too big. We'll remake those in sizes that are more appropriate.

From there, the sky's the limit...

One Of Those People

Last year, we stopped in and spent about an hour at Dead Horse Point State Park while we were on a vacation.

While we were there, Little decided that he wanted a sticker for his souvenir. It was one of those stickers you would put in your back window or on your bumper. Not really sure why he wanted such a thing, but that's what he picked.

Months went by, and he did nothing with the sticker. When my wife told him to take it off the bar in the kitchen and go put it away in his room somewhere, he decided that he didn't have anywhere for it to go. Instead, he asked my wife if he could put it on her car. She frowned, but couldn't really give a good reason why she shouldn't allow him, so she said okay.

The next day, I went out to get into my truck...and found that Little's sticker was on my back window, not my the window of my wife's car. Little changed his mind on the way out to put the sticker on, and decided he didn't need to bother asking me. So, I had a big window sticker on my truck.

For a long time, that's how it stayed. But then, just a few weeks ago, we went out to Yellowstone National Park, and while we were in the gift shop, I thought, "What if I got another window sticker from Yellowstone, and I become one of those people who has lots of stickers from their travels in their window?"

I went for it. I got a sticker for Yellowstone, then one for Lewis and Clark Caverns when we stayed a day there, and then one from Waterton National Park in Canada when we spent a day there. My single sticker in the window was now four. But I never do anything part way (that's not generally true, but sometimes it is).

When we got back from our trip, a big pack of stickers that my wife had ordered from Amazon for Little to decorate his school folders with. They were camping related stickers, and there were 200 of them. Little went through them and chose the ones he wanted, and when I asked him if I could use some of the other ones on my car, he agreed. 

These stickers were basically the kind of thing you might find in a visitor center somewhere. It was possible that they might fade really fast or something, because they were so cheap, but I rolled the dice and gave it a shot. I went through and picked all the stickers that were portraying something that I had been to, from Cancun and San Francisco to Arches National Park and Yosemite National Park. Now I had stickers on both the driver and passenger side windows.

My wife told me I could get stickers like these even cheaper from Temu. I don't have a lot of trust in Temu, but my wife loves it. She ordered me a pack of National Park stickers from Temu, and we waited for them to arrive. When they showed up, they were minuscule. Way too small to work on a window. The last set of stickers I used were a little small, there were about half the size of those.

"Whoops, sorry," my wife said, and we put the stickers in a drawer in case we ever wanted to use them for something in the future. They had only cost $1, after all, so it wasn't a big deal. I decided to give Temu a second chance. This time, I went through and bought separate stickers, rather than a huge pack, because the stickers in the packs were too small. The separate stickers must be larger.

Well, those stickers came last night, and I hadn't considered how much larger those stickers might be. Look at the sticker compared to the size of my hand!

That thing is as big as my hand with the fingers outstretched. It's huge! And almost all of them were that large. Only two of them were the right size to be a window sticker. I was irritated. I sorted through the stickers, and took the few of them that were on the smaller side of the huge ones, and still put them on. So, my windows look like this now:

If you can't tell, the Grand Teton National Park sticker is one of the new ones...it was the smallest of the big ones.

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and the Glacier National Park stickers are the new ones on this side. Those are both really big, but they're narrow at least, so they don't look as ridiculous. I considered using another one, but I just couldn't do it. Too freaking big.

I guess I'll have to see if I can't find some stickers somewhere on Temu or maybe even go over to Amazon and pay full price to get new stickers to replace the ones that I got that are too big. We'll see if I can't manage.

But I am definitely one of those people now.