Stationery kleptomania!

Today we have a guest post from Angela who has the blog Paper Love Story. Angela is a twenty year old who flits between the city of London and the countryside of the East Midlands in the UK. She blogs about fashion, stationery, things relating to paper and life in general.

As a university student or even, a student in general, pens and the like are a necessity. In fact, because I've got this fact into my head, I can't seem to stop buying stationery! However, most of my pens are in London so I can only show you a limited sample... well, I say limited but I'm not so sure my mum agrees as she comments on my vast collection whenever she lays eyes on it. Anyway, here is the collection in various improved pen pots:

As you can see, I use random things as pen pots. The only genuine pen pot is the one in the bottom left which originally held a set of eighteen Muji coloured gel ink pens. You'll notice that there are pegs - useful for when you've opened that bag of sweets or crisps and don't want to finish it in one sitting.

Let's take a closer look at a few of these pens.

Top left - the bog standard black Sharpie. This was given to me in my first year at university for use in labs. I use them to write on test tubes.

Top right - the pen at the top is a red Uniball rollerball and I use it for writing up lecture notes and extra reading. The red is used to underline important words or to write important words down. The bottom three pens are highlighters I got at a careers' fair last year. I'm not sure I was actually allowed to have three but my excuse is that I'm a student - anything free goes (to a certain extent anyway)!

Bottom left - These are a selection of my blue pens (not all of them, mind you!). From top to bottom: Parker fountain pen, blue Uniball rollerball, Pentel 0.7mm Energel liquid gel ink, a free blue rollerball from Allen and Overy, a Zebra fineliner and a blue Muji 0.5mm gel pen.

Bottom right - From top to bottom: Zebra black fineliner, Papermate biro, a pen I got for free from CHP Consulting at a careers' fair last year, a free black ink pen from Lovells law firm from a careers' fair and a Uniball eye pen.

The few free pens I've shown are from careers' fairs. From my last two years' at uni, I've learnt to have no shame when it comes to fairs. The freebies are there for the taking and if I don't take them, someone else will! And when it comes to stationery, it's better that I have it than someone else who may not appreciate it as much as me ;)

Next is a picture of another freebie I got from a fair last year from the Nature stall. These are sticky notes. I also got loads from Deustche Bank and BCG. 

And finally, when it comes to writing notes, I'm a bit of a neat freak. And sometimes, when you're not concentrating, you can make a slip of a mistake; thus ruining the neatness. As a result, one of these may come in handy:

All in all, various fairs at university are heaven for stationery lovers. If you, like me, have no shame and go to every stall in order to get the freebies (and the all important careers information too, of course), then you can end up going home with several bags full of free and some, very decent stationery too. I once went home with five bags full of freebies including free mugs, glasses, pens, highlighters, sticky notes, notepads and rulers. Also, to be fair, not all pens that you get are bad and here's the proof! The pens displayed are ones from earlier on in the post and the colours are from the free highlighters. I've not included any other free biros I've got as I usually find them a bit lacklustre (apart from the CHP Consulting one, clearly).

That's it from me. I hope you've enjoyed this post from me about how university has actually gotten me some very, very nice (and free!) pens. But take it from me - the best stalls to go for are usually the law society or the finance society ones!