I tend to only journal in my bullet journal occasionally. But every so often there comes an event or period of my life where I feel that journaling isn’t quite enough. Where writing down my memories isn’t quite enough. Which is where my new Phomemo Printer comes in. With this printer, I can now quickly and easily add photos to my journal or memory pages in my Bullet Journal. And in this article, I’m going to show you how.
The Phomemo Printer
Before we start, let me just tell you about the Phomemo printer that I’ll be using.
Phomemo comes from combining the words Photo and Memo together. It is a thermal printer, so doesn’t require any ink. It just uses thermal paper and heat to print black and white images.
The Phomemo printer is super easy to use. It arrives packaged in a sturdy little box with a minimal instruction booklet reminiscent of Apple packaging. The first thing you do is take it out of the box, peel off the protective plastic film and plug it in to charge. While your printer is charging the green power button flashes, once it stops flashing, it’s done charging. This took no more than 15 minutes!
While you’re waiting for the printer to charge, you can head over to your App Store on your phone and download the Phomemo App. You’ll need this to print your photos or notes. The cute thing about this App is that they’ve already included some templates for you to use. These include some fun frames, to-do lists, simple frames, and little calendar schedules. You can edit all these by adding text to them before you print.
The Phomemo printer comes with a roll of sticky backed thermal paper. You have to open the printer to find it and remove the tape that is holding the roll together. Then make sure you have your paper inserted correctly – the printing side should be face up.
Once your printer is fully charged, just open up the app, select what you want to print and then hit the print button in the top right-hand corner. If the printer isn’t connected already, the app will ask you to connect. This will literally take seconds. When you print, the Phomemo will immediately start printing like magic. The time it takes (or doesn’t take) is astounding!
Creating a Memory Spread
I decided to create a double page spread in my bullet journal about our family holiday away in Nelson earlier this year. To start with I hand-lettered the title for my pages “A week in Nelson” using a brush pen and adding some detail by outlining and adding a drop shadow.
Next, I selected my favourite photos from our holiday (this was no easy task). I simply used the Phomemo app to select and print the images I had chosen. When printing, you have the option of selecting “fine”, “normal” or “thick”. After experimenting, I’ve come to the conclusion that this means how dark you want the photo printed. Here’s an example, the left photo is printed using “normal” and the one on the right is printed using “thick”. I have a preference for the darker photos and have printed all of my photos this way.
Using a pair of scissors, I trimmed the edges of the photos and together with bits of scrap paper and Washi tape, I stuck these to my pages. Since the paper you receive with the Phomemo printer is sticky backed, you don’t need any extra adhesive such as glue etc.
I decided to add some printed headings to my memory pages as well. Although the Phomemo App does allow you to print notes and “micro print” notes. (See the photo above for the difference between printing a note and micro printing). The Phomemo App doesn’t have the ability to print various fonts or fonts in different sizes. So to do this, I used the Canva App (which is free):
How to Create Headings with the Phomemo Printer
- Open the Canva app.
- Create a “business card” (this creates the perfect size print out for the Phomemo Printer).
- Add text to your business card, changing the font and the size as you wish.
- Download and save the business card to your phone either as a png file or a jpg file.
- Open the Phomemo App
- Select “print images” and find your business card which should have been saved to your photos
- If you want this printed landscape view, make sure to rotate the image 90 degrees.
If you need to you can trim the heading down to size and add to your bullet journal as I did.
Tip: The sticker paper can be very hard to peel off of the backing paper if you trim the sticker first. I found it a lot easier to peel off the sticker first and then trim to size.
Write down your memories
Finally, to finish off my memory pages, I wrote down my memories, filling up the blank spaces. I also added a caption to one of the photos using the note function in the Phomemo App.
I love how my memory spread turned out. And I especially love seeing the photos from our holiday on our pages. Using the Phomemo printer made this so incredibly quick and easy and I will definitely be using it a lot more in my bullet journal.
You can currently find the Phomemo printer on Amazon, which is also where you can purchase replacement paper for the printer. It is priced at between $69.99 to $79.99 depending on the colour you fall in love with. The colour choices are pink, blue/green, white, black or black piano.
In comparison to other pocket printers in the market, the Phomemo printer can be cheaper. But if you factor in the fact that you can get replacement sticky backed paper at $9.99 for THREE rolls each being 3.5m each compared to the same price for only 10 sheets of photo paper! Then this printer is definitely more value for money!
If you want to find out more about this cute little printer, then you can check out the Phomemo website here!
Happy Journaling,
If you enjoyed this article, share it on Pinterest!
