My Guilty Pleasure

Ok, so everything scrapbooking is a guilty pleasure for me. I love creating beautiful pages about my family and friends. I’ve always admired those fancy stickers you can get (Jolees and other 3d stickers). They add such a beautiful finish to any page. Adding a lot of character and making it look fun. Since I scrapbook about kids, the page always has to be fun.

I have to admit, as much as I love these stickers, they sure are expensive. So from these stickers, I decided to try paper piecing. It takes a bit of time and effort, but the results are beautiful. But you think I can find sites that have a variety of paper piecing templates? At my cost? Free?

Know I can’t remember if I read it somewhere (so if I did, thank you for the idea!), or if I was actually brilliant enough to come up with the idea myself. (highly unlikely) So here it is: use coloring pages as your paper piecing template. A coloring page with lots of big open spaces would probably be a good way to keep your sanity in tacked.

Brilliant, isn’t it? You start with a base color, hopefully a color that the majority of the item is going to be. You trace the object on to your page and cut it out. You can use a light box or a window on a sunny day. If the page is too dark to see through, put the coloring page on top of the colored paper and using a pencil, trace along the lines on the coloring page. This will leave an indentation on the cardstock underneath. Then you can just over these indents with your pencil again. Now you can cut out your shape.

Now comes the tricky part. You need to trace all the smaller areas onto other colors of papers, cut them out and glue to this base color. For example: if you have a cartoon character you are working on, say Pablo (see picture), I started with blue. Then I traced out his tummy. But then I needed a blue bow tie, so I went back to my blue and cut that out and glued it on top of the yellow. I used a black marker to make outlines on the pieces and to draw in the lines that were originally on the coloring page. (see the foot?)

If you need to attach two pieces of paper together, you’ll need to make sure you leave some overhang where you can glue and attach the two pieces. Like the hat. I cut out the hat along the top, but left about an inch on the bottom so I could line up the hat perfectly with the head but still have some paper to put glue on to attach to the head.

(I sure hope all this is making sense) So give it a try! I know you won’t regret it.