paper: Scrapbooking with stickers. So many stickers. | pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

I think stickers take a great deal of flak from the world. Maybe because they are something we associate with childhood learning, like Crayolas. Maybe because mass-market stickers are flimsy or a bit random. But in the scrapbook world, our stickers are pretty fancy and high-quality and nothing like the scratch and sniff smiley face earned by learning your spelling words when you were age six. Though I have a pretty eternal love for Crayolas, so it may well be that if scratch and sniff smileys appear in the scrapbook world, I’ll embrace that too. I have no intention of growing out of using stickers on my scrapbook pages.

When I first started scrapbooking, I heard the term ‘sticker sneeze’ often. It was one of the only design pointers given in the nineties, it seemed: don’t just spray your page with stickers in all the gaps surrounding your matted photos. My very first pages completely embody the sticker sneeze. Then with a bit of development, I recovered from that cold on my own. A year or so later I attended my first informal scrapbooking class, and the teacher took us through a page step by step: mat the photos and adhere them. Add letter stickers for the title. Write in the date and place and any relevant names. Now take these small stickers and sprinkle them in all the gaps. It turned out there were plenty of people who loved their pages like this and there were others trying to talk them out of it. All that really mattered was that you enjoyed your own pages, so I say sneeze all you want, be that a little or a lot. Sometimes the gaps on my pages are still made happier with small stickers, even though my style has changed from then to now.

Starting with square and rectangular stickers can help build a page from plenty of stickers without it bringing to mind any symptoms of hayfever. I started this page with the three blocky stickers at the top, and matted them on contrasting colours for a frame, which also made it easier to move them around the page while I decided where things should go. They were very grey and neutral and I wanted more colour, so I brought in that yellow die-cut with the red heart, but trimmed it down to place it on a 3×4 card with a rainbow stripe. That was a bridge to all the other colours I could include without it feeling like too much. The zig-zag tape sticker at either side is actually one short sticker cut in half to stretch it across the full page width. There are really two repeating motifs at play here – the hearts, but also the combination of chevrons and arrows, pointing your eye to different parts of the page. There are stickers stacked on stickers stacked on stickers, with plenty of pop dots to hold it all together, and the ease of stickers makes all those layers go together so quickly because there is nothing to cut or punch or build. This is one of my favourite ways to build a design over a longer span of time. Leave it out on the desk and take five minutes now and then to find something else that fits in the space and move it around like a jigsaw. Eventually it all balances and then the trick is to just stop and leave it be!

Again, I had plain white cardstock in the background and decided to cut that away on the edges and add it to a patterned paper for the full 12×12 background. Everything except the cardstock, the gems, and the spray mist is from the June kit. Well, then there’s that red background. That is from the July kit and I accidentally put it in the wrong spot on my desk and now it’s on this layout. Had I done that on purpose, I could have just called that working ahead.

Your third challenge (and your final challenge for this evening – more tomorrow morning!) is to create a page where you go to town with plenty of stickers. It can be any style and any theme, but we’re not just talking a couple little stickers over here in the corner. Use stickers for as much of the embellishment as you can! It can be blocky and orgainsed; it can be stickers that fill the space between photos. Whatever you enjoy when making your page! Upload your finished project to your blog or a scrapbook page gallery, and share a link here.

PS: Yep, that’s two pages about The Boy in a row. I’m just going to warn you: there are more to come. You know how sometimes when something sad happens to someone else, it makes you take everything dear to you and hold it closer? You’re fine, but yet you can’t keep something out of your mind because it just brings things too close to home and you imagine it hitting your life. Lately that has been taking the form of scrapbook pages for me. I make no apologies, and to the contrary, I will actually say it really helped me to not get too bogged down and overwhelmed by something that I had no power to change. Just saying that in case it helps anyone else out there. There is sometimes more to the way I scrapbook than just rules of three and 4×6 photos, I promise.

Read more about: best-of-both-worlds-kit

02 August 2013

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