• Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Freebies
  • Gallery
  • Nav Social Menu

    • Bloglovin
    • Email
    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • Pinterest

The Yellow Birdhouse

Helping you live your best crafty life

  • Crafts & DIYs
    • Felt Crafts
    • Sewing & Embroidery
    • Crochet
    • Everything Else
    • My Favourite Felt Tools
  • Mom Life
    • Fun Stuff for Kids
    • Parenting
    • Decor
    • Printables
    • Homemaking
    • Life
  • Holidays
    • Birthdays
    • Christmas
    • Valentine’s Day
    • Easter
    • Springtime/Mother’s Day
    • Halloween
    • Baby Showers
  • Creative Business
    • Etsy Tips
    • Pinterest Tips
    • Best Biz Tools
    • Work/Life Balance
  • Shop
    • Etsy Shop
    • Sewing Patterns
    • Flower Patterns
    • Ebooks

DIY Sticker Books for Kids

October 19, 2018 by Laura Leave a Comment

Last Updated on March 3, 2022

Often when I order something from Amazon, it arrives in a much-too-big box which is filled with brown paper or those little air pillow thingies. It feels crazy to me to take a perfectly good piece of brown paper and just throw it out. (Well, recycle it actually, but still.) Sometimes I save the paper for the kiddos to simply use for colouring, or I use it to draft sewing patterns. This time though, I used it to create DIY sticker books for the boys!

How to make a DIY sticker book for kids out of upcycled paper. A simple tutorial for both reducing waste and creating a fun project for the kiddos!

 

This post contains affiliate links. Read more.

My boys have an on-again off-again relationship with stickers. It’s either a sticker mania phase or a total loss of interest in all things sticky. Are kids incapable of a happy middle ground?! With anything in life? Who knows.

At any rate, in an effort to reuse items before they hit the trash AND in an effort to not spend more money, I created these upcycled DIY sticker books. Now when the sticker mania strikes, about once a month when their sticker subscription arrives, the boys have books with their names on them to use as they please!

This was a good mail day! Our Pipsticks orange envelope of joy arrived! My oldest is in charge of checking the mail every day and needless to say, he was quite pleased when he pulled out the big orange envelope. ๐Ÿ˜€

It's a happy day when our Pipsticks sticker subscription arrives in the mail!

Pipsticks is a monthly subscription with a variety of options. You can get a kid themed subscription or one more for adults who still love stickering! *cough* me *cough*. Each month you get a selection of stickers plus colouring postcards, activity booklets and other fun paper goodies.

So let’s get crafting!

DIY Sticker Books

At first my plan was to find some cute scrapbook paper to use as cover pages for the books. But it turns out that the pretty paper is $1/sheet and I would need 2 sheets per book. For $4 I could have just gone to the dollar store and bought sticker books. Which defeated the point of this project being upcycled. lol

So I decided to create a personalized design for each book and print them off on some cardstock that I already had. Yay for free ideas!

Designing the Cover

Creating the personalized covers was actually super simple. I started with free graphic patterns that I got on Creative Market. (They aren’t currently available as freebies anymore, but check back each week for new free graphics that could work too!)

I opened up Picmonkey and selected to design a custom sized canvas. To make it fit an 11″ x 8.5″ sheet of cardstock, it needs to be 3300 x 2550 pixels.

I turned on the alignment grid (by clicking that little box icon second from the left in the menu below your design) and set it to 2 rows x 2 columns so I could easily find the middle of the page.

Use Picmonkey to design the front cover of the sticker book

Then I uploaded a graphic from my computer, by clicking the butterfly icon in the left side menu, and resized it till it filled half the width of the page and about 3/5 of the height. Height doesn’t matter as long as the graphic fills at least half of it.

How to add the graphic to your cover page

To duplicate the graphic, right click on it and select ‘duplicate graphic’. This will give you an exact copy of the resized graphic that you can drag into place.

Duplicate the graphic 3 times and drag them each to line up with the center.

At this point I turned off the alignment grid and zoomed in a bit so I could precisely line up the designs. Use the arrow keys rather than dragging the mouse in order to move your graphic a tiny bit at a time. Now it’s seamless!

Creating a personalized cover page for your diy sticker book

Turn the grid back on but change the column and row numbers to 4.

Add a rectangle graphic and make it white. Increase the size so it takes up about half of the upper right quadrant. Line it up using the grid as a guide.

Create a box so you can personalize the sticker book

(I only left the rectangle purple in this picture just so you could see what I’m talking about. The white on white was too hard to see.)

All that’s left is to add the text. I chose the Nexa Rust font, which is a Picmonkey font. (You can also get loads of free fonts every week on Creative Market!) Line it up inside the white rectangle and you’re done! I printed my designs off on coloured cardstock because that’s what I had.

Make a simple personalized cover page for your diy sticker book for kids!

A quick note about Picmonkey: It’s a fantastic photo editing and design program. I literally use it every single day for both personal and business projects. All graphics that you see on my site have been designed using Picmonkey, I recommend it 1000%. ๐Ÿ™‚

Next we assemble the books!

Assembly

Gather up the cover pages, the brown paper and some baker’s twine or ribbon or thick thread.

Use upcycled brown paper to make diy sticker books for your kids

You’ll also need your iron, a pencil, ruler, straight pin, glue stick and large sewing needle.

Did you know you can iron paper? Well you can! I set my iron to a medium-high heat and put the steam to it’s lowest setting, but not off. Then I ironed all the brown paper as flat as it would go.

Cut out a backing for the front cover, about 10.5″ x 8″ and glue it in place.

Add an extra layer of sturdiness to the front cover of your diy sticker book

Cut out the rest of the brown paper sheets about 10.25″ x 7.75″. You may end up trimming these even more at the end. But this isn’t a precise project, it’s art not science after all! ๐Ÿ˜›

Group together about 12 sheets, line them all up and fold them in half to make a centre crease.

Fold your front cover in half and place a mark at 4.25″ down, inside the crease. Place a mark at 3/4″ intervals along the entire crease. Your top and bottom marks will be about 1/2″ from the edge of the paper. Poke through all the marks using a straight pin.

Creating an upcycled sticker book for kids

You’ll probably want to enlarge the pin holes using an awl or the tip of a mechanical pencil.

Use an awl to make larger pin holes to sew through

Repeat this process with the brown paper sheets. Mark your centre at 3 3/8″ down the crease, then add marks spaced 3/4″ starting at centre. I was able to go through all the layers at once using the straight pin followed by the awl.

DIY sticker book tutorial

Now all that’s left is to stitch it all together!

I started at the first mark at the top, went down to the bottom then came back up. To create a solid line of stitches front and back. Then I just tied a bow with the loose ends. Done!

Stitching together your DIY sticker book

Once you fold the book shut you may notice that some of the brown paper needs to be trimmed back so it’s not sticking out past the cover page.

Make a cute DIY sticker book for your kiddos using upcycled paper!

 

Then I let the kids do their thing. ๐Ÿ™‚

They loved opening up their Pipsticks subscription to discover what was inside, Ezra went straight for the puffy tiger stickers!

The boys having fun opening their Pipsticks subscription

 

Creating DIY sticker books to go with our pipsticks subscription.

The great thing about these DIY sticker books is that the paper can be drawn on. Traditional sticker books are super glossy, so you can’t use markers with them. With these, the kiddos can create scenes with their stickers, or have mommy draw them their own bank statement to decorate. True story.

Having fun with these diy sticker books for kids.

 

Sticker book tutorial. Simple DIY for an upcycled sticker book for kids

 

William absolutely loves doing mazes!

There you have it! I had fun creating these DIY sticker books, and the boys had fun filling them up with their Pipsticks goodies. It was a good day!

Tell me, are your kiddos nuts for stickers too?

mail for sticker lovers.

Filed Under: Crafts & DIYs, Everything Else, Fun Stuff for Kids Tagged With: crafts & diys, diy sticker book for kids, diy sticker books

Previous Post: « 30 Cardboard Box Costumes
Next Post: 17 Sites with Fun and Free Hand Embroidery Patterns »

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Hey There!

I’m Laura, a busy work at home mama to two amazing boys. I help moms live their best crafty life, whether that’s with fun DIY projects or running an online shop. My passion is crafting with wool felt, but you’ll find a little bit of everything on the blog since I’m an unstoppable crafter and I love to share! Read More…

Recent Posts

  • 16 Free Printable Father’s Day Crafts
  • 18 Free Printable Mother’s Day Crafts for Kids
  • Easy DIY Felt Dusty Miller – Free Pattern

Felt Woodland Animal Patterns:

Connect with Us

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest

Legal Stuff

POLICIES
PRIVACY
DISCLOSURES

Copyright © 2023 ยท The Yellow Birdhouse

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this if you continue to visit this site. If not, feel free to leave, no hard feelings!Accept Read More
https://theyellowbirdhouse.com/privacy/

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT