Yep, I'm behind on my scrapbooking. Like, waaaaaay behind. Christmas just happened three weeks ago, but I'm still working on Easter. That said, since we're not anywhere close to Easter, I've been able to collect a few sticker sets on clearance over the last year.
I love clearance. It's the first section I visit whenever I go to any store--especially craft stores. That's why I decided to create this series: "Crafting on Clearance". Here, I will use an item I find deeply discounted or on clearance at any store and use it to inspire an art/craft project.
In this case, I have two purchases I used to inspire my Easter scrapbook pages. I bought the first two sticker sets (right and center below) at Walmart just after Easter for fifty cents. I found the second "nicer" set at Michaels (left below) just last week for a dollar. The sticker aisle at the store was full of clearance stickers, so look forward to seeing a bunch of sticker themed crafting in upcoming weeks.
I rounded out the project with some generic scrapbook paper trimmed to 8x8 and some fabric tape I've had in my stash for years. I printed the pictures on a basic color printer. I don't remember what size I used, but I was able to print six pictures per page. This size fits really well in an 8x8 scrapbook.
Yes, the pictures won't last forever because they were printed on regular paper rather than photo paper, but I don't really care. I think of scrapbooking as kind of an extension of art journaling, so there aren't any rules.
To help the pictures stand out on the pages, I glued them on to the back of scraps of scrapbook paper using an Elmer's glue stick. Then, I trimmed the paper around them to make a white border. You could measure the paper so it's more precise, but I just eyeball it.
I know the theme of the pages ties them together, but I thought it might be nice to add a little something to really anchor the pages and make them cohesive. Like all crafters, I have a huge stash of supplies I've been collecting for years, so I pulled out some flowered tape that is kind of like washi tape except that it's made of fabric.
I placed a strip all the way across the top portion of one page and the bottom portion of the other. Again, I just eyeballed the placement to make it fairly even, but you could measure it to be more precise.
Then, it was time for the fun part--putting the stickers on the page wherever I liked. To get a good idea of how I wanted the page to flow, I placed the pictures on the pages first without gluing them down so I would know what parts of the page would be free for adding stickers. I used some of the stickers from each set on both pages to make sure the pages looked similar without matching.
Here are the final pages with the pictures glued in place:
I ended up using all of the stickers from the Michael's set and only a small portion of the Walmart sets. It's not that I didn't like the Walmart sets, but there were way more of them. I'm sure I'll be able to find plenty of other projects to use them on later.
Altogether, this project met several of my crafting needs. It was affordable, used things from my stash, added to my scrapbook, helped me remember a happy time, and let me relax with a fun activity for about an hour. I bought a bunch of sticker sets at Michael's along with this one, so look forward to several more clearance sticker posts in the near future.