I’ll Stop the World and Make with You || DIY Sticker Books

This post is sponsored by Kid Made Modern. I am so thankful to work with wonderful sponsors here on This Little Miggy as it allows me to continue to make great content. Thank you for supporting sponsors here and as always, all opinions are my own.


Lately, I have been feeling overwhelmed with a never-ending “to do” list that I’ve been facing and will continue to face over the next couple of months. Everything from moving woes, to house choices, to blog and book deadlines, and of course the day-to-day task of keeping my offspring alive. (Just checked on them… Yep. Still breathing.)

At the height of this anxiety about 2 weeks ago, when I had a list of tasks that needed my immediate attention, I made the rational decision to drop everything and spend 2 days making sticker books with my kids. YES, I SAID STICKER BOOKS LET ME LIVE MY LIFE.

I’m not sure I can explain my love of sticker books, but let me try.

It was the early 80’s. I was in the first grade. I lived in Gering, Nebraska. The internet wasn’t invented yet. We didn’t have cable TV (because who in the world could afford cable television in 1983?) and Nintendo wouldn’t be mainstream for a few more years.

BUT…

We did have a store called The Teachers Corner with walls and walls and rolls and rolls of stickers. Puffy stickers. Smelly stickers. Big stickers. Little stickers. Glittery stickers. Hologram stickers. We may not have had a lot of the finer things in life in ol’ Gering, but by golly we had stickers. And if you had stickers, you needed a sticker book. Sticker books back then were these laminated books you could buy to keep your sticker collection in and to trade with your friends. Because the pages were laminated, you could peel them off and re-stick them somewhere else. Out of all the trends from my childhood, stickers and sticker books were my favorite.

Last Christmas I gifted my girls a sticker subscription from PipSticks, the best source I’ve found for stickers. And then a few weeks ago I got my hands on one of their Mega Mystery boxes and suddenly I had myself a whole new stash of adorable, shiny, puffy, smelly, magical stickers. So of course we had to make some sticker books. Because modern day “sticker books” are simply notebooks of plain paper (plain @$$ paper!) that you put your stickers in and I’m sorry, but what horrible anti-childhood-magic adult thought of that? It’s basically the work of Gargamel himself.

Follow along to learn what you need to make your own legit sticker book!

Supplies
Paint and brushes (my favorites are from Kid Made Modern)
Thick painting paper (cut in half to get the right size)
Craft paper + Glue (optional, but if you want to collage)
laminating machine (optional, but cheaper than getting them laminated at the store)
Laminating sheets

1. Paint, create and have fun! The girls and I got to work just painting the different backgrounds we each wanted for our sticker books. Each book is 5 pages front and back, except for the last page we only did one side so that the back of the book is blank, but you can do it however you want. I mostly stuck to these 5 colors from the Kid Made Modern washable paint set that were the perfect colors out of the bottle (I did add a little orange to the yellow to make it a bit more golden rod.) 

This is the part that takes the most time since we’re doing full pictures front and back and you have to wait for a page to dry on the front before you can do it on the back. But it was so fun to just paint and paint all day, see what we were each doing and share ideas. We also did some collaging to change it up. I ended up doing quite a few of my pages collage style and I almost preferred it. Some of our ideas: Landscape scenes like mountains, beach, a city or PSP’s farm scene pictured above. A favorites page with a polka dot background, a giant rainbow, a plant page or another interior space would be fun, and totally abstract pages.

2. Laminating. I had planned to take all of our pages to Staples to have them laminated and bound there. The cost to laminate was $3.00 per page. Then quite a few people in Instagram told me to buy a cheap laminating machine for $20 and do it myself! So I did and now I want to laminate everything! It’s very easy to use–almost self explanatory.

3. Binding. This was the only thing we couldn’t do ourselves. We high tailed it to our local Staples and asked them to do a spiral bind along the side. It was $12 for all 4 books.

And then you’re done and free to trade (or not trade) stickers with your favorite sticker loving peeps. Here are some of my favorite pages my girls and I created.

We had the best time making the books and we’ve had a great time adding stickers to our books and trading with each other. However, just because you’re the fruit of my loins it doesn’t mean I’m going to give you one of my glitter moons for a dog in a leprechaun hat OK? Get your head in the game girls!

Happy Sticker Book Making!

Anyone else have a nostalgic love for stickers and sticker books from your childhood? Do you still have your old sticker book? I would give anything to have my old sticker book. I believe the most memorable stickers were the scratch and sniff ones–they go for a small fortune on Ebay and Etsy! What were your favorite stickers?