Stickers play an important role in resistance and activism. I hope this will encourage you to print them out, stick them places, and also make your own stickers to share!
They are made to be printed using cheap-ass thermal printers, and are great with holographic or glittery sticker material.
Links to our cheap-ass thermal printer of choice, found by Chloe Madison @clomads. We got "Like New" ones that were on sale for $10, which is the first link. There were a limited number available, and we convinced so many people at Teardown 2025 to get them that they sold out. The second link is for "New" ones and it looks like the normal price for these is $20. It's probably still a good deal because not many printers that size will actually accommodate up to 3" labels (most stop at 2"). Though honestly, you can do a lot with 2" stock.
Fun holo and glittery label stock:
Tips for printing with this cheap-ass printer:
- Only tiny spools fit within the printer. Cool holo sticker stock does not come on tiny spools, so you will need to re-spool them onto a smaller spool, or roll them very tightly yourself. Chloe made a 3D printable spool that takes a typical 1/4" hex drive so you can re-spool with a power tool, files in the Spools folder.
- There is a movable stop on the right side of this printer that can be adjusted to fit your spool size. A little tab on the stop locks it into place. (This can be easy to miss).
- If the spool is seated all the way to the left, there will be a small dead space on the left side of your label that you will be unable to print on. Try taping a coin to the left side of the spool compartment to space your spool off the left side a bit. Then you can get pretty much full print coverage on your label.
- It sometimes has trouble with shiny stock, but actually does handle it. Mine would normally spit out 1-2 labels when loading & calibrating. Sometimes it would spit out 10 or go on forever. Just give it a little on/off timeout, move the labels around, etc. It'll figure it out eventually.
- If the wasted label at the beginning of the roll bugs you, I found a hack. Say you have only 4 labels left on your roll. Print out 5 copies of your sticker. It'll pause because it's out of labels. Take your label sheet out, reverse it so that the unprinted label at the beginning is now in the machine. Make sure your first printed label is half in / half out of the machine. Close the lid. It'll automatically feed to the end of the current label and immediately start printing on the next (unprinted) label, without doing any calibration sequence. I know, no waste is so satisfying, right?
Apps for the printer:
- I'm using OffNova's app, 4Barcode.
- Chloe uses OpenLabel with the TSPL protocol.